There is an interesting article in the Winter 2007 issue of Cigar Magazine about Red Lion, P.A. Red Lion was a small town that in the early part of the 20th century produced 400,000,000 cigars per year, or about 20% of all U.S. made cigars! These were not premium cigars by a long shot, but they were the life’s blood of this little town.

Red Lion’s cigarmaking community kept on innovating, and the little town had more than one thousand brand names being produced. In reality though, those brands had little differentiation. “They were basically all the same cigars,” Frutiger confirms. “In my grandfather’s factory, we had sixty-three labels for the same cigar.” He also notes that, on the day Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris in 1927, three Red Lion cigarmakers were staked out in Washington to lay claim to new brands, Lucky Lindy, World’s Greatest Flyer, and Our Flyer–all the same cigars from the respective factories, with new names and packaging.

1904 W. A. Lahr - Porto Rico Leaf Tobacco Co.