Red Lion, Pennsylvania 🦁 The Nickel-Cigar Town and the Labels It Left Behind
🦁 Some of my favorite cigar labels never came from Havana or Tampa. They came from a little borough in York County, Pennsylvania, where at one point it seemed like every kitchen table had a pile of tobacco leaf on it.
That borough is Red Lion. In its heyday it was turning out millions of cigars a month, and the paper labels that dressed those cigar boxes are still turning up today, crisp and unused, gold embossing and all. Here's the story of the town, the people who built it, and the labels they left behind.
🦁 Where is Red Lion, and how did it get its name?
Red Lion sits in the rolling farm country of York County, in south-central Pennsylvania, not far from the Maryland line. It was settled in 1852 and became a borough on January 16, 1880, and it was a main stop on the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad, the line locals called the "Ma & Pa," which ran down to Baltimore.
The name is where the fun starts. John Gibson's 1886 History of York County said it came from an old Red Lion Tavern with a lion painted red on its swinging sign. By tradition, that lion was no scary beast at all. Gibson described a mild, peaceful sort of fellow with an inviting look, the kind of lion that welcomed thirsty travelers in rather than scaring them off.
📜 Not everybody bought it. When the town wrote its own golden jubilee book in 1930, the authors went looking for that tavern and couldn't pin it down. The inn on the square had been Shenberger's Tavern as far back as 1830, and the oldest residents had never seen a red lion sign hanging there.
They did find one sign. In 1875 Seth Minnich built and painted a red lion sign for the building Catherine Meyer put up on the spot where the Ma & Pa depot later stood. Her place was a general store, saloon, post office and railroad station all in one, and by then folks were already calling the spot Red Lion.
And then there's the version the old residents told. The soil around town runs reddish, and the wagon road through it was said to be known to travelers as the "Red Line." Mishear "Red Line" and say it wrong often enough, the story goes, and you get Red Lion. The 1930 book admitted it had nothing but the old residents' word for that one. I love it anyway.
Catherine Meyer's name turns up again on the petition to make Red Lion a borough. The town's first election was held at her public house in February 1880, and three Neffs signed that petition too. Hang onto that name, because it comes back on a cigar label later.
🚬 How did a small York County town end up rolling cigars for the whole country?
It started with tobacco in the fields. In 1837 Benjamin Thomas of nearby Windsor Township developed Pennsylvania seed-leaf from Havana seed. During the 1840s York County was the leading tobacco-growing section of the state, before Lancaster County took the lead.
When a farmer couldn't get a fair price for his leaf, he could always roll it himself. The 1930 jubilee book says York County cigar making began as a family industry, often nothing more than a room in the house or a little outbuilding behind it. A bigger manufacturer would supply the tobacco and sometimes the molds, and the family would strip the leaf and roll the cigars for around sixteen cents a hundred.
Red Lion itself had only about two cigar factories when it became a borough. The honor of the very first goes to Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Neiman, who opened theirs in 1873 and 1874. Nathaniel signed the incorporation petition and sat on the first town council.
🚂 Then the railroad did its work. Gibson counted about 30 cigar factories in Red Lion by 1886. That same fiscal year, York County cigar makers paid $580,257.77 in cigar stamp revenue, more than half the total for the whole revenue district.
By 1907 the Internal Revenue deputy collector in York counted roughly 1,200 cigar factories in the county, big and small, making an average of 300 million cigars. By 1920 Red Lion so dominated the trade that York County ran two tax offices, one for the county and one just for Red Lion. In 1927 the town had 109 cigar factories and made about a fifth of all the nickel cigars made in America.
👩👧 Who actually made the cigars?
Everybody. In 1979 Timothy Lockyer recorded the memories of Red Lion's old cigar workers for Pennsylvania Heritage magazine, and they describe a town where kids stripped tobacco at home and banded cigars after school. Tobacco merchant Arthur Meads, who gave the 109-factory figure, said many of those factories were just a man, his wife and their children.
Women generally did the rolling and men did the bunching, forming the filler and binder that went inside. A good roller like Valetta Leiphart could turn out eight or nine hundred cigars a day. Starting pay, she remembered, was fourteen or fifteen cents per hundred.
🪙 Margaret McDowell, who was 95 when she was interviewed, remembered rolling for twenty-five cents while eggs cost a nickel a dozen and rent ran eight to ten dollars a month. Her family built a whole house around 1903 for $1,100.
Getting into the trade wasn't free either. One Red Lion manufacturer we'll meet below paid for his training by making 10,000 cigars for his teacher without a cent of pay. After that he earned twelve cents a hundred, about 36 cents a day.
🪙 What was a nickel cigar, and what's a "twofer"?
Red Lion's bread and butter was the five-cent cigar, the everyday smoke of working America. In 1914, during a long Senate debate, Vice President Thomas Marshall reportedly muttered to a clerk that "what this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar." The joke wasn't his invention, but Red Lion was busy filling that order.
When times got tighter, the nickel cigar became two for a nickel, the "twofer." Charles Stump told Lockyer that fine Sumatra wrapper leaf had gotten too expensive to use on a two-for-a-nickel cigar.
💛 The Have A Sweet cigar label tells that whole story right on its face. A 5 CENTS shield is crossed out, and under it the label brags that millions were sold for 5c each, it's the same cigar, and now it's 2 for 5c. The HAVE A SWEET trademark belonged to T. E. Brooks & Co. of Red Lion, which claimed first use in 1941 and registered the mark in January 1953.
🏫 Who was T. E. Brooks?
Thomas E. Brooks came to Red Lion from Chanceford Township in 1886 and started learning cigar making at fourteen. His first job as a full-fledged cigar maker lasted exactly three hours. His boss fired him and told him he'd better learn the trade all over again.
A few days later he had another job, at twelve cents per hundred cigars, and he went to school in the winters. He became the first boy from Red Lion to enroll in a school of higher learning away from home, the York County Academy, and at seventeen he passed the teacher's exam. He taught for years, including four terms in the Red Lion schools, at a starting salary of $28 a month.
📈 In 1900 he, S. S. Sechrist, D. A. Horn and Fred Smith formed the Porto Rico Cigar Co., and in August 1911 he opened his own factory with six cigar makers. By 1930 T. E. Brooks & Co. ran five factories with six hundred people and shipped about 60 million cigars a year to every part of the country.
The First World War made the big Red Lion firms. Ida Noll Ehehalt told Lockyer the soldiers smoked so much that the factories couldn't make enough, and that's when Brooks and the other big manufacturers made their money. Brooks went on to serve in the Pennsylvania legislature in 1919 and 1921, became the first president of the Red Lion Lions Club (of course the Red Lion club was the Lions), and led the York County Cigar Manufacturers' Association.
🏷️ His best-known brand wears his initials. The Tebson Perfecto De Luxe label starts with T.E.B., carries his signature as "T. E. Brooks & Co.", and flanks the name with two gold roundels bearing his monogram. That crest was registered to T. E. Brooks of Red Lion in September 1932, after a claimed first use that May, which puts these labels in the 1930s.
💼 How did J. C. Winter go from $75 to 150,000 cigars a day?
J. C. Winter's story is the one I'd tell any young person starting a business. Born on a farm near Hanover Junction in 1888, he moved to Red Lion with his parents in 1905 and started out keeping books for a wheel maker, then for cigar manufacturer William A. Lahr.
When he struck out as a cigar jobber, all he had was $75. He bought his first 5,000 cigars as a job lot from Fred Smith on a 60-day note for $90. Around 1910 or 1911 he rented a little factory on First Avenue and started making his own cigars with three hands.
😬 Then in 1915 one bad account wiped him out, about $3,800, everything he had. He picked himself back up, partnered with Titus A. Smith, and by the end of the First World War J. C. Winter & Co. was running as many as thirty-two factories, from big shops of seventy-five hands down to one-person operations.
In 1927 Winter and T. E. Brooks swapped properties, and Winter rebuilt his Pine Street factory to turn out 150,000 cigars a day. He merged with the Laucks Tobacco Co. in 1929 and incorporated at $500,000, with his sister Amelia C. Winter as treasurer. By 1930 the firm was making 800,000 to 900,000 cigars a week and ran a distributing branch in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The Flor de Manuel Babies label is a J. C. Winter & Co. brand. It's gold embossed coins around a gentleman's portrait on deep blue, and its Brooklyn printer's line means it was printed in 1926 or later.
🌴 Why did the government make Red Lion stop saying "Havana"?
By 1949 a mail-order ad in Esquire was selling "J.C. Winter's Specials" by the box of fifty, listed among the "Blended Havana Domestics." Then came the Cuban embargo, and suddenly the word Havana on a domestic cigar meant something it hadn't before.
⚖️ On August 3, 1964, the Federal Trade Commission entered a consent order against J. C. Winter & Co. of Red Lion. It named the brand names "Havana Blunts," "Winters Havana Special" and "Blended with Havana," and barred the word Havana on cigars that weren't made entirely of Cuban tobacco. Amelia C. Winter was still an officer of the company, thirty-five years after she became treasurer at the 1929 incorporation.
Curt Gentry's 1966 book The Vulnerable Americans named Winters Havana Specials among the brands whose makers were told to stop pretending they'd gotten around the Cuban trade blockade. The black-and-white Winter's Havana Specials cigar band carries that very word, Havana, in script across its face, a small paper piece of Cold War history.
🇨🇭 Who was W. C. Frutiger, and what was Factory 417?
William C. Frutiger was born in Berne, Switzerland, in 1881, and his mother died the day he was born. His father came to America that same year to work at the steel plant in Steelton, Pennsylvania, with three children, William just two months old. With no money, he had to place the children in the Dauphin County Almshouse until he could make a home for them.
🌊 Young William nearly drowned in a terrible June flood on the Susquehanna at Steelton, when the water rose to within six inches of the family's second floor. Boats brought them out, and a kindhearted soul took them in until the water went down.
At sixteen he came to York County to learn cigar making, and that's who paid for his training with 10,000 free cigars. After twelve years at the bench he started making cigars at home, next to the kitchen stove, with his wife as his only coworker. By 1910 he had five cigar makers, in 1916 he built his own factory on Hyson Alley with twenty, and by 1919 he had at least fifty hands.
The rest of the Frutiger story comes from his grandson, Bob Frutiger, who told it to Chip Brooks for The Cigar Label Gazette in 1999. In Bob's account, W.C.'s Factory 417 made cigars in Red Lion from 1920 to 1967. It stood four stories tall, 50 feet wide and 150 feet long, with a big skylight on the top floor so workers could judge the color of the tobacco.
📦 About 135 people worked there in the 1920s and 1930s. W.C. bought his labels about ten years' supply at a time, typically 95 bundles of 500, and if a brand sold slowly that supply could stretch to twenty years. When prices changed, he just stuck a new price sticker on.
He made about fifteen brands. Bob named Bank Note, Big Wolf, Hambone, Sun Maid, Victory, Banker's Bouquet and El Garcia, and he counted Bank Note and Sun Maid as the premium cigars. The Sun Maid label prints "TITLE & DESIGN OWNED BY W. C. FRUTIGER & CO." under a lady holding an open box of cigars before palms and a sunset, with its matching strip label still attached below.
🏛️ Victory has the best story of all. As Bob told it, W.C. created Victory during the First World War and production dropped off after the war. When the Second World War came, he made Victory again, using the labels left over from the first war. The Victory gladiator label carries the same Frutiger credit line, with its arena vignette, gold crowned-helm crests and a matching strip label on the same sheet.
In 1950 Factory 417 switched to machines making a single shape, the panatela. Six machines made 5,000 cigars a day each, about 30,000 a day with ten employees. Bob said the factory closed shortly after W.C. died in 1967, the building and equipment sold at auction for $7,200, and the spot where Factory 417 stood is now a parking lot.
🧾 What's the story behind Record Bond?
Remember those Neffs on the 1880 petition? The name runs all through Red Lion's cigar history. Martin Neff was among the town's early cigar manufacturers, and W. J. "Whorley" Neff, born in Red Lion in 1884, started his own firm in 1908 and later served as a York County commissioner.
💵 Record Bond belonged to H. L. Neff, cigars. The trademark RECORD BOND VALUE RECEIVED claimed a first use of January 15, 1909, and was registered on August 29, 1944. The Record Bond label shows a cuffed hand gripping a sealed bundle of banknotes between stacks of gold coins, with VALUE RECEIVED and REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. beneath it. That registration notice tells us these sheets were printed after August 1944.
The brand has a happy postscript. In 2016 a Pennsylvania tobacco family whose company made Record Bond in York County, a family that prefers to stay private, donated 50,000 cigar bands, box labels and pieces of memorabilia, plus seed money, to bring the cigar back with the Hamptons Cigar Manufactory & Museum.
🖨️ Who printed all those gorgeous labels?
Look at the very bottom edge of several of the labels above and you'll find the same foot line: CONSOLIDATED LITHOGRAPHING CORPORATION, BROOKLYN, N.Y.
Consolidated was the work of Jacob A. Voice, who came to America from Romania as a small boy. TIME magazine reported in 1935 that he started at fourteen as a bronze feeder at Steiner's lithography shop for $2.50 a week. In 1926 he merged his firm with Steiner's to create Consolidated, and by 1935 TIME called it the biggest cigar band maker in the world, printing the bands for 70 percent of America's domestic cigars.
🎨 Consolidated worked in Brooklyn from 1926 to 1952 and on Long Island until 1980. That Brooklyn imprint is a handy dating tool: any label wearing it was printed between 1926 and 1952.
Every Red Lion maker guarded his own label. Ida Noll Ehehalt remembered that each manufacturer had one and nobody else was allowed to use it. Frutiger's Sun Maid and Victory both say so in small type: TITLE & DESIGN OWNED BY W. C. FRUTIGER & CO.
📉 What happened to Red Lion's cigar industry?
The cigarette happened. After the First World War cigarettes started replacing cigars, and by 1940 they ruled American tobacco. The Depression closed dozens of Red Lion's small factories along the way.
Machines finished the job. Harry Thompson told Lockyer one woman could roll 600 cigars a day while a machine made 6,000, and one machine could replace eight or ten people. In 1934 layoffs and machines touched off a strike, with women lying across a factory driveway to block the trucks and police using billy sticks and tear gas.
🏚️ Red Lion still had about 5,000 people and 60 cigar factories in 1947. The Consumers Cigar Box Company building at 121 First Avenue, begun in 1921, made cigar boxes until the 1950s and is on the National Register of Historic Places today. Red Lion was also known nationwide for more than a hundred years for its ornate handcrafted furniture.
🎆 Does Red Lion still celebrate its cigars?
It sure does, or at least it has for years. In 1999 Bob Frutiger described New Year's Eve in Red Lion: he and a friend rolled cigars inside the Red Lion Historical Society building while 1,500 to 2,000 people gathered outside to watch an eight-foot cigar, held by a big lion, rise to the top of the building. Not a ball dropping in Times Square, the Gazette noted, but a cigar going up.
For years volunteers from the Municipal Utility Authority scrambled up onto the roof to raise it. On New Year's Eve 2025, Levittown Now reported, Red Lion skipped the tradition over liability worries, with fewer people available to make the climb. A local developer, Jordan Ilyes, hopes to bring the cigar back as part of a celebration at his Franklin Street Social property. I hope he does. 🦁
❓ Quick answers about Red Lion cigars
How many cigar factories did Red Lion have? About 30 in 1886, according to John Gibson's county history, and 109 in 1927, according to tobacco merchant Arthur Meads. Some were big plants with hundreds of workers, and many were a single family working at home.
How much of America's cigar supply came from Red Lion? By 1927 Red Lion made about a fifth of America's nickel cigars, and the town is credited with about 10 percent of all the cigars made in the United States.
How can I date a Red Lion cigar label? Read the fine print. A Consolidated Lithographing Brooklyn imprint means 1926 to 1952, and a registration notice means the label was printed after that trademark was registered.
🚬 Every one of these labels was made to sit inside a cigar box lid in some corner drugstore or barbershop, and these never got that far. They're Red Lion's kitchen-table industry in paper and gold, and I'm glad to help keep the town's story going.
