Cigars and Sponges: The Trades That Built a Fortune

• The neighborhoods our guests explore today — their cottages, their narrow lanes, their unmistakable multicultural texture — were drawn by hand long before they appeared on any map. The trades in this chapter are the reason Old Town looks and feels the way it does, and the reason a stay here comes with a lineage rather than just a key.

  If the first chapter of this series explained how Key West grew rich, this one is about the hands that did the work. The island’s wealth was not abstract. It was rolled, hooked, dried, and graded — the product of two great industries that turned the surrounding sea and the nearby shores of Cuba into a fortune.

  

  The Leaf: Cigar Making

  As the Industrial Revolution reshaped the nineteenth-century economy, Cuba’s cigar industry blossomed, and Key West — a mere 90 miles from Cuba’s tobacco plantations — proved the ideal place to establish cigar factories. In 1867, German immigrant Samuel Seidenberg opened the island’s first “clear Cuban” cigar factory. By employing Cuban laborers to roll Cuban-grown tobacco, he pioneered the idea of making authentic Cuban cigars on American soil. Within a few years, Cuban immigrants were arriving by the thousands to work in the booming trade, drawn by Seidenberg’s offer of affordable housing and steady employment.

  The industry grew with astonishing speed. By 1873 there were 15 factories in Key West employing more than 1,200 workers. Eduardo Hidalgo Gato — the first Cuban to own a major Key West factory — built the largest factory on the island alongside a village of cottages that came to be known as “Gatoville,” where many of his workers and their families lived. By 1876, the island’s 29 cigar factories were producing 62 million cigars a year. By 1890, with a population of more than 18,000, Key West was the largest and wealthiest city in Florida, and that year alone, over 100 million cigars were handmade here.

  The heyday could not last. The unionization of workers eventually drew the largest cigar makers to Tampa; nickel machine-made cigars arrived; and then the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, leaving the expensive hand-rolled Cuban cigar unable to compete. The island’s great cigar era closed — but its legacy and cultural imprint remain a vibrant part of Key West to this day.

  

  The Sea: Sponging

  The island’s second great trade came from the water. Sea sponges were discovered in the Florida Keys in the 1820s, and they quickly became the basis for one of Key West’s most lucrative businesses. Native fishermen first found sponges washed ashore after storms; soon, settlers located the rich beds hidden in the remote backwater country of the Keys. The challenge was the island’s isolation — it was difficult and expensive to get the sponges to market. A shipment of samples sent to New York in 1849 settled the question: their softness and variety appealed immediately to consumers, launching an industry that would last well over 50 years.

  Most beds lay in roughly 20 feet of water, harvested from small vessels called “hook boats” — named for the long wooden poles, tipped with a curved iron rake, that fishermen used to pry the sponges loose. Sold through the Key West Sponge Market, the cargoes were displayed in graded piles and auctioned daily at three o’clock, with no auctioneer at all: buyers simply pinned folded paper bids to the piles, and within an hour new ownership was settled. At its peak, Key West held a near-monopoly on the American sponge trade, employing 1,200 men across 350 hook boats and producing some 2,000 tons a year — worth roughly $750,000 to the local economy, second in importance only to cigars.

  Change arrived with Greek immigrants who had harvested sponges in the Mediterranean for centuries. Rather than hook boats, they used diving suits with heavy lead boots to reach deeper beds. Local spongers were skeptical — and, as it turned out, correct: walking the beds in lead boots damaged the young sponges and reduced future harvests. That, combined with overfishing and the rapid spread of a deadly sponge fungus, brought Key West’s sponging industry to an end in the early twentieth century.

  

  Two trades, two communities, one shared inheritance.

  The Cuban cigar rollers and the Greek and Bahamian spongers gave Key West more than its wealth — they gave it the multicultural character that still defines the island’s neighborhoods, architecture, and spirit today. It is the Key West you step into the moment you arrive.