Tampa, Florida

====Ybor's cigars====
{{See also|History of Ybor City}}
[[File:Lewis Hine, Cigarmakers, Tampa, Florida, 1909.jpg|thumb|right|Rolling cigars, 1909. Photo by [[Lewis Hine]].]]

The new railroad link enabled another important industry to come to Tampa. In 1885, the Tampa Board of Trade enticed [[Vicente Martinez Ybor]] to move his [[cigar]] manufacturing operations to Tampa from [[Key West, Florida|Key West]]. Proximity to [[Cuba]] made importation of "clear Havana tobacco" easy by sea, and Plant's railroad made shipment of finished cigars to the rest of the US market easy by land.<ref name="Lastra, Frank 2006">Lastra, Frank. ''Ybor City: The Making of a Landmark Town''. 2006. University of Tampa Press.</ref>

Since Tampa was still a small town at the time (population less than 5,000), Ybor built hundreds of small houses around his factory to accommodate the immediate influx of mainly Cuban and Spanish cigar workers. [[Ybor City]]'s factories rolled their first cigars in 1886, and many different cigar manufacturers moved their operations to town in ensuing years. Many [[Italians|Italian]] and a few Eastern European [[Jews|Jewish]] immigrants arrived starting in the late 1880s, opening businesses and shops that catered to cigar workers. By 1900, over 10,000 immigrants had moved to the neighborhood. Several thousand more Cuban immigrants built [[West Tampa]], another cigar-centric suburb founded a few years later by Hugh MacFarlane. Between them, two "Latin" communities combined to exponentially expand Tampa's population, economic base, and tax revenues, as Tampa became the "Cigar Capital of the World".<ref>Mormino, Gary. ''The Immigrant World of Ybor City''. [[University Press of Florida]]</ref>
[[File:TampaFranklinStreetNorth.jpg|thumb|right|Franklin Street, looking north past the [[old Hillsborough County Courthouse]], Tampa c. 1910s–1920s]]