Lima in the first half of the 20th century was a city of lunch pails, factory whistles, hard work, hard workers, and, of course, lunch-hour folk dancing.
“Noon hour at Lima’s factories and industrial plants is beginning to be something more than a time to eat as far as the girl employees are concerned,” the Lima News reported in September 1925. “Bosses and foremen were surprised to find their sedate and dignified help frolicking in a most unusual manner.”
The “frolicking,” the News explained, was folk dancing the women learned at the Lima YWCA “as a means of entertainment and exercise for factory girls who get little or no exercise in their work as cigar workers …”
Women comprised a majority of the workforce in Lima’s cigar industry, which got its start shortly after the end of the Civil War, flourished in the first half of the 20th century and ended with the closing of the RG Dun factory in 1990.
On January 1, 1950, the Lima News looked at the city’s changing industrial landscape since 1900 and decided that “only Lima-made cigars survived among major manufacturing concerns.”
According to the News, Lima was home to more than a half dozen cigar manufacturers at the turn of the century, including Deisel-Wemmer, which began in 1884 with German immigrant Henry Deisel and his wife hand-rolling cigars at home and would grow into the Deisel-Wemmer-Gilbert (DWG) company. The list of Lima cigar makers would only grow in the early years of the 20th century when the American Tobacco Company and the Odin Cigar Company among others began making cigars in Lima.
“Ironically, although cigars were, with the exception of the occasional Bonnie Parker or some other bad girl, almost exclusively identified with men, the majority of workers making them were women, particularly before cigar rolling machines came into wide use around 1920,” the News wrote in 2013.
In her book on the work culture in American cigar factories between 1900 and 1919, author Patricia Cooper wrote that some manufacturers preferred women for their “innate skill and nimbleness” in rolling cigars, while others liked women who, because they didn’t tend to smoke cigars, also didn’t tend to filch them. Another manufacturer employed women, Cooper noted, “because they were always here on Monday morning.”
In Lima, Cooper wrote, employers “hoped to recruit workers from nearby areas as well as the town and used paternalistic policies to win over doubtful parents.” In February 1903, as the American Tobacco company was preparing to begin operations in the Hawisher building at the corner of Main and Elm streets, the Lima Times-Democrat noted, “It is thought that a number of persons will have to be brought from other cities as a sufficient number cannot be obtained in this city.”
Lima’s cigar makers were seemingly always looking for female workers. “Wanted – industrious girls, to learn the cigar trade, girls are well paid while learning. Inquire at the American Cigar Co., Main and Elm streets,” read a typical ad in the Lima News in 1903. In September 1903, a story in the Time-Democrat showed the lengths cigar-makers were willing to go to retain their workers. “The local managers of the American Tobacco company, the newspaper wrote, “have installed a piano on the third floor of their factory (the machine room) and every afternoon one hour is devoted to music, which is enjoyed by employees.”
Around 1930, DWG refined its appeal for female workers by adding “Left Rollers Preferred” to its ads. There are different theories about why cigar manufacturers preferred left-handed cigar rollers. One theory is that they could produce more cigars a day while another holds that left-handed rollers created tighter and more even cigars. A third theory is that left-handed rollers were simply more rare and therefore more valued.
Although machines eventually supplanted left-handed and right-handed humans as cigar rollers, women had long since come to dominate other parts of the cigar-making process, such as stripping the leaves from the stem and bunching the cigars.
Eugene Wemmer, a grandson of Henry Deisel and grand-nephew of William Wemmer, told the News in February 1979, that “95 percent of the hand-rollers were women.” When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, he added, “Deisel Wemmer was able to retain full employment because people didn’t stop smoking cigars. The women of Lima saw a lot of their families through some hard times.”
In 1952, Lima native and author John Sonntag’s novel “No More Tomorrow” was released. Based on the cigar industry, the novel, the News wrote in January 1952 prior to its release, “tells the story of the sacrifices a mother makes to give her family security …” Sonntag, whose grandfather owned the first hand-rolled cigar plant in Lima in 1868, told the News, “The mother in my story has $250 and a downtown shop. She starts making hand-rolled cigars and gradually with the entire family helping – the father is dead – they form a tobacco empire.” The book is long out of print.
From the mid-1940s until 1978, many of Lima’s former cigar rollers gathered for the annual reunion of the Old Time Cigar Makers. Before the 1958 reunion, the News estimated some 700 “old time cigar makers” remained in the Lima area. “When there were 16 cigar factories in this area … cigar makers earned approximately $25 a week, members of the organization say,” the newspaper wrote.
By the time of the final reunion in 1978, only one cigar manufacturer remained in Lima – RG Dun, the last local vestige of the once massive DWG company. In 1990, RG Dun shut down.
“Lima will take its last puff of cigar manufacturing Friday when the RG Dun Corp. ceases production at its downtown plant,” the News wrote November 27, 1979. “The end of production will extinguish the jobs of about 30 workers and close an era that has filled the Lima air for 106 years.” A company official blamed the closure on a decreasing demand for cigars in an increasingly health-conscious society.
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SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
LEARN MORE
See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at info@limanews.com.
