Vicente Martinez Ybor

Vicente Martínez Ybor (7 September 1818 – 14 December 1896) was a Spanish entrepreneur who first became a noted industrialist and cigar manufacturer in Cuba, then Key West, and finally Tampa, Florida.

Martínez Ybor is best known for his founding of the immigrant-populated cigar manufacturing town of Ybor City just outside Tampa, Florida, in 1885. It was annexed by Tampa in 1887 and was a major factor in the community's rapid development from a small town into one of the largest cities in Florida and, for a time, the world's leader in cigar manufacturing. In addition to his Principe de Gales line of Cuban cigars, he founded many other businesses in Tampa including an insurance company, street paving, gas stations, a streetcar line, and Tampa's first brewery. For his workers, he built and sold hundreds of affordable homes, brought doctors to the area, and converted his original cigar factory into a social hall and theater for Tampa's first mutual aid society, El Centro Español de Tampa. His business interests were integral to the rapid expansion of the Port of Tampa and Tampa's overall economy.

When Martínez Ybor died in 1896, much of Tampa closed down to attend his funeral. He has been honored with a statue in Ybor City and a bust on the Tampa Riverwalk. and took a job as a grocery clerk before learning the cigar business.

History Cuba In 1856, Martínez Ybor founded his own small cigar manufacturing company in Havana, Cuba and began selling his El Principe de Gales ("Prince of Wales") brand. The brand quickly became popular, and Martínez Ybor's factory was soon producing 20,000 cigars a day.

While his business prospered, conflict between Spanish and Cuban workers, labor unrest, and the difficulty of transportation to and from the island city of Key West eventually led Martínez Ybor to decide that he should again relocate his business.

Martínez Ybor's plan worked. After a slow start, both his businesses and Ybor City as a whole flourished, with the area's cigar factories hand-rolling and shipping tens of millions of cigars annually by the late 1880s, the number increasing into the hundreds of millions by the turn of the 20th century. Ybor City was annexed by the city of Tampa in 1887 and helped the once small and struggling town grow into an important manufacturing and shipping center by the early 1900s.

Personal life Martínez Ybor married Palmia Learas while living in Cuba in 1848, and they had four children before her death.

Martínez Ybor's grave site in the St. Louis section of Tampa's Oaklawn Cemetery

Death and legacy Martínez Ybor's role in initiating Tampa's phenomenal growth in population and wealth in the late 1890s was widely acknowledged and appreciated during his lifetime. After his death in Tampa on 14 December 1896, the headline of the Tampa Tribune read "Great Benefactor Gone" and many of the businesses in town closed in his honor for his funeral.