Samuel Seidenberg
German immigrant who opened Key West's first "clear Cuban" cigar factory in 1867, two years before Vicente Martinez Ybor arrived on the island.
Seidenberg opened his Key West factory in 1867, using Cuban tobacco and Cuban labor to make what the trade called a "clear Cuban" cigar: authentically Cuban in leaf and craft, but rolled on American soil and so exempt from the tariffs Spain placed on finished cigars leaving the island. His flagship brand, La Rosa Espanola, became one of the young clear-Havana trade's early successes and predates the more famous factories that Vicente Martinez Ybor and others opened in Key West over the following two decades.
Labor unrest pushed Seidenberg off the island in 1894, when he moved the operation to Tampa's Ybor City and built a 35,000-square-foot factory there, part of the same relocation wave that shifted the industry's center of gravity from Key West to Tampa. By then the business was headquartered in New York and run by his brother Joseph Seidenberg; Seidenberg & Co. grew into one of the larger American cigar manufacturers of its era, with factories along the East Coast employing a reported 1,500 to 2,000 workers.
The Tampa factory building outlived the company's cigar business by decades, later serving as home to the Ybor City Brewing Company and then as office space, an ordinary afterlife for the district's surviving factory architecture. Precise birth and death dates for Seidenberg are not well documented in available sources and are omitted here rather than guessed.