Willis: Tobacco Town of Montgomery County

For a couple of golden decades in the late 1800s, this small Montgomery County town was the cigar capital of Texas. Area farmers discovered that the local climate and soil grew superb tobacco — high-grade Sumatra and a Cuban Abajo variety that won awards as far away as Chicago and Paris — and by the 1890s farms within five miles of Willis were producing up to ninety percent of all the tobacco grown in Texas. Cigar factories rose in town, the largest a brick works on Bell Street employing around a hundred hands, and at the peak eight cigar operations ran here. Willis out-hustled its bigger neighbor Conroe in the 'tobacco race' and crowned itself the tobacco king of the state. Then it ended almost overnight: after the Spanish-American War of 1898, the government dropped tariffs on Cuban tobacco, and Willis's growers lost their edge. This short drive walks the markers of that vanished boom — the factory site, the churches and colleges it funded, the pioneers, and the cemeteries — a portrait of a town that briefly ran on smoke and won.