Ybor City Museums

The museum occupies the former Ferlita Bakery (originally La Joven Francesca) building at 1818 9th Avenue. The bakery was known for producing Cuban bread and its ovens are part of the museum displays covering the history of the cigar industry and the Latin community from the 1880s through the 1930s. There is also an ornamental garden in the building (available for rental after regular hours).

Tours of the gardens and the "casitas" (small homes of cigar company workers) are provided by a ranger. Exhibits, period photos and a video cover the founding of Ybor City and the cigar making industry.

Ybor City Museum State Park

Ybor Roger: Ybor's Decline and Rebirth

The Depression was a major blow to cigar manufacturers. Worldwide demand plummeted as consumers sought to cut costs by switching to less-expensive cigarettes, and factories responded by laying off workers or shutting down. This trend continued throughout the 1930s as the remaining cigar factories gradually switched from traditional hand-rolled manufacturing to cheaper mechanized methods, further reducing the number of jobs and the salaries paid to workers. more

Ybor City Notable Natives: Ferdie Pacheco

Fernando Pacheco was the personal physician and cornerman for world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali as well as numerous other boxing champions. He was born in Ybor City. more

Ybor Roger: Ybor City's Golden Age

Ybor City grew and prospered during the first decades of the 20th century. Thousands of residents built a community that combined Cuban, Spanish, Italian, and Jewish culture. "Ybor City is Tampa's Spanish India," observed a visitor to the area, "What a colorful, screaming, shrill, and turbulent world." more

Local Historian Ybor Roger - Ybor City Establishment

In the early 1880s, Tampa was an isolated village with a population of less than 1000 and a struggling economy. However, its combination of a good port, Henry Plant's new railroad line, and humid climate attracted the attention of Vicente Martinez Ybor, a prominent Spanish cigar manufacturer.

Ybor had moved his cigar-making operation from Cuba to Key West, Florida, in 1869, due to political turmoil in the then-Spanish colony. But, labor unrest and the lack of room for expansion had him looking for another base of operations, preferably in his own company town. MORE

Ybor City - Immigrants Town

Ybor City was founded in the 1880s by 
Vicente Martinez-Ybor and other cigar manufacturers and was populated by thousands of immigrants, mainly from Cuba, Spain, and Italy.
 For the next 50 years, workers in Ybor City's cigar factories rolled hundreds of millions 
of cigars annually.

Ybor City was unique in the American South as a successful town almost entirely populated 
and owned by immigrants.

By historian Ybor Roger and Wikipedia