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This photo shows the building at 1301 7th. Ave. as it looked
when it
housed a General Cigar Co. plant.
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HUNTINGTON --
From 1947 to 1959, the General Cigar Co. operated a plant at 1301 7th Ave.,
where it produced as many as 1.5 million White Owl cigars weekly.
From around
1905 to the early 1940s the six-story building had been the home of J.M. McCoach
& Co.,
a cold storage business. The company used water from four artesian wells
in the building to make as
much as 120 tons of ice per day. Owner John McKay McCoach specialized in wholesaling apples,
storing thousands of bushels and then
distributing them throughout the South.
When General
Cigar bought the building it spent $75,000 to make it suitable for
cigar
production. The company employed 500 workers, most of them women.
In a 1954
interview with the Huntington Advertiser, plant manager A. Jambe noted that the
1.5 million
White Owl cigars produced each week would, if placed end to end,
stretch for 16 miles. The plant's annual
production would reach one-third of the
way around the world. In the 1950s,
a cigar smoker could buy a White Owl for 10
cents.
With the end
of World War II, General Cigar, one of the nation's largest and best-known cigar
makers,
anticipated an increased demand for their product and so began a search
for a suitable site for a new
plant, a search that lead the company to
Huntington.
General
Cigar's Huntington plant operated successfully for more than a decade until 1959
when, in a
surprise move, the company announced its closure. In an official
statement, the company said the
closing was unavoidable as rising costs had
forced it to consolidate its cigar manufacturing operations.
In 1962, the
building was purchased from General Cigar by Frigid Storage of Huntington. Since
then,
the building has housed various warehousing operations. The former Stone &
Thomas department store chain
used it as a warehouse for a number of years.
Still standing and in use after more than 100 years,
the building is now home to
Watts Brothers Moving & Storage.
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Note: This Article and picture appeared in the Herald-Dispatch Newspaper on Jul. 20 , 2015
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