King Edward Cigar Factory - Jacksonville, FL
Posted by: 
lazyCachers
N 30° 21.219 W 081° 38.823
17R E 437815 N 3358151
Located just north of downtown Jacksonville, Florida.
Waymark Code: WM3T8K
Location: Florida, United States
Date Posted: 05/14/2008
Views: 148
The King Edward Cigar Factory (open weekdays; guides), 459 E. 16th St., is a flat-topped white factory-type building, its many windows trimmed with green, and with aluminum-painted ventilators on the roof. All cigars produced here are machine made.
The tobacco used for outside wrappers is moistened, placed under burlap and left for 24 hours before passing through stripping machines that remove stems and cut the leaves in half. These are bunched, the excess moisture is removed, and they are sent to trained selectors who sort the leaves according to color and quality. Filler tobacco is sweated under canvas for from 10 to 25 days, stemmed and halved, and packed into paraffin-lined cases until the correct degree of evaporation takes place. This process is known as 'casing.' The filler tobacco passes into a machine that chops it into half-inch pieces, blows away the dirt and powder, and delivers clean tobacco to curing bins.
When properly seasoned, the filler is fed into a machine that measures it into exact quantities to be bunched and wrapped with a filler wrapper; in a second machine it is covered with an outside wrapper; then it is inspected, banded, placed in a cellophane envelope, and boxed. Machine operators are paid .80 per thousand cigars. The factory output is more than 1,800,000 cigars each 24-hour work period.
- Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, 1939
The Swisher International Company introduced the King Edward cigar in 1918 and it became one of the chief revenue-generating products that would propel the company in the decades ahead.