Welcome to The Cigar Shop at the

Historic Chipley Antique Mall

Treat yourself to a fine Hand Made Imported Cigar from our Cigar shop.

Hours of Operation

Closed Sunday & Monday
Tuesday 4:30-8PM
Wednesday 4:30-8PM
Thursday 4:30-8PM
Friday 4:30-8PM
Saturday 10AM-5 PM

We have been selling Premium Hand Rolled Imported Cigars at the Antique Mall since Memorial Day 2007 when we started with about 5 brands. We now stock on average about 25 to 30 different cigars with a growing inventory. If we don’t have what you smoke, let me know and I will try to stock them for you. 

The History of the Cigar

The history of the cigar goes hand-in-hand with that of tobacco. Many have claimed the discovery was theirs and it is as good as impossible, nearly five centuries later to distinguish fact from fiction.  One thing is certain- the history of tobacco starts with the discovery of America.

It is a story replete with its early heroes, ranging from explorers to conquistadors, and it includes the most famous of these, Christopher Columbus when on 12 October 1492, Columbus landed on an island called Guanahani by its inhabitants and later renamed San Salvador, now part of the Bahamas.

The inhabitants of this island told Columbus of a much larger island near by called Cuba. Columbus immediately decided to make for this island and landed there on 28 October 1492, a date which marks the start of the tobacco and cigar era in Europe.

In Cuba, Columbus met large numbers of “Indians”, men and women, walking round “with a little lighted brand made from a kind of plant whose aroma it was their custom to inhale, they carry a lighted piece of coal and some of the grasses, and inhale the aroma using catapults which in their language they call tabacos.” possibly the forerunner of the cigar.

Following Columbus, the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, a navigator from Florence for whom America was named made four crossings for Spain and Portugal and claims to have discovered tobacco. In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan, from Portugal, took tobacco from the New World to Asia for the first time and left a few plants in the Philippines. And the list goes on and tobacco was spread around the world.

Over the years the various methods of smoking became established based on the different customs in lands where tobacco was discovered. Tobacco from the East or from North America was generally smoked in pipes and later in the form of cigarettes. Tobacco from Caribbean and Central and South America was smoked in a form similar to the modern cigar.

Today the best cigars arguably are from the Caribbean and Central and South America although there is still a lot of romance and mystique surrounding cigars from Cuba.

Cigar manufacturing has become an art from down through the centuries, the tending of the fields of tobacco through the curing and fermenting of the leaves, the blending of the fillers to the hand rolling techniques employed by the master cigar roller or torcedor.

The colors of tobacco can be green to blond, tawny Havana, brown to black and a whole range of colors in between. For a long time Cuban factories listed over 200 such shades. Today, around 60 of these have been retained as wrapper colors, lying mainly between the Claro or tawny Havana and the and the Maduros or brownish-blacks.

Even the cigar rings and the boxes they are packed in are works of art adorned with colorful Vistas or painting and designs.

The various types of cigars are defined by their size, shape and diameter or ring gauge, this being the diameter of the cigar measured in 64ths of an inch, thus a 48 ring gauge is 48/64ths of an inch or 3/4".

The various types of cigars have size names such as Demi-Tasse with a ring gauge of 30 to 32 and a length of 3 7/8”, Panetela with a ring of 26 and length of about 4 ½” the Corona at a length of 5 ½” and ring of 42, the Churchill weighing in at 7” in length and a ring of 47. The sizes and lengths of cigars are very extensive.