cut opened an inn at Pomfret, he had ambrosial cigars 

 to offer patrons and friends. Their scent reached across 

 the countryside and pervaded the Valley. Farmers, 

 sniffing the aroma, were inspired to improve the quality 

 of their tobacco and produce a better leaf for cigars. But 

 they w^ere premature; the better leaf was still nearly a 

 century off. 



T 



he pioneer cigars 



Putnam may have been responsible for a trend. For 

 within a generation of his time, there was a swing in the 

 taste of Connecticut smokers to cigars. West Indian 

 cigars were coming into the state by 1791, the year in 

 which an advertisement offering "segars" first appeared 

 in the Connecticut Courant. But it was not before 1795 

 that tliis commodity, manufactured in Cuba, was being 

 imported into the United States in any substantial quan- 

 tity. In 1799 the Connecticut Courant published the first 

 advertisement of "segars" of domestic manufacture. 



Except for cigarettes, then still rare, all recreative 

 forms of using tobacco were being practiced in Con- 

 necticut. The older, confirmed smokers were clinging to 

 their pipes, though tobacco chewing was fairly popular 

 among farmers and sailors. In Europe the age of snuff 

 was coming to its end, but many Americans, particularly 

 among the wealthy, were devoted to the scented tobacco 

 powder. The General Assembly in 1784 had awarded a 

 25-year snuff -manufacturing monopoly (with tax exemp- 

 tion for 14 years) to one of Connecticut's highly re- 

 spected jurists, William Pitkin. 



The trend to cigars became more obvious in the early 

 1800's. It was to result in considerable economic gains 



26 



