The Willis Cigar Factory stood on Bell Street in Willis, facing the railroad, when the Willis area was the leading tobacco-growing district in Texas. After the Civil War, Montgomery County farmers found the soil and climate suited to tobacco, and in 1891 a farmer named John Blum raised a good crop of Vuelta Abajo leaf from Cuban seed. Other growers followed with a bumper crop in 1892. By 1895 the fields around Willis supplied seven cigar factories; the state historical marker at the factory site counts eight cigar operations at the peak. Willis tobacco took first prize at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and again at the 1900 Paris world's fair. The factory was founded by Capt.
Thomas Wesley Smith, a Kentucky native, Civil War veteran and former Montgomery County sheriff who lived from 1829 to 1901, who ran it with his son Owen. It employed about 100 workers. Smith had moved his business from Montgomery after the railroad chose Willis for a station: Galveston merchants Peter and Richard Willis donated the townsite in 1870, and trains were running through it by 1872. East Texas growers also used the state's convict-lease system for cheap field labor.
The boom was short. After the Spanish-American War of 1898 the United States lowered its tariff on Cuban tobacco, and the Willis crop shrank to about 70 acres by 1901. By the end of the First World War, rising cotton prices had drawn East Texas growers away from tobacco. The factory was abandoned by 1910 and burned by vandals in the 1930s, and a state historical marker placed in 1986 marks the site.
Getting there
30.4263, -95.4795
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
