Churchill's Fine Cigars and Gifts Inc - Hot Springs, Ar

03/09/2026

Open
Wed - Sat
11am-6pm

03/08/2026

The to***co dust was thick enough to taste. The sun went down, but the shift didn't end.

Samuel sat at the wooden bench on the East Side of New York. It was 1873. He rolled ci**rs by hand.

The room on Houston Street had no ventilation. The windows were nailed shut to keep the to***co leaves from drying out. The men worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week.

If you stopped rolling to stretch your back, you didn't get paid. If you complained about the air, a replacement was sitting on the stairs waiting for your chair.

The air smelled of wet leaves, sweat, and cheap kerosene. The foreman held the pocket watch. The watch belonged to the factory owner.

To keep their minds sharp, the cigar makers pooled their pennies. They paid one man to read the newspaper out loud while the rest of them rolled.

Samuel listened to the reader. He heard about the railroad barons in Chicago and the steel mills in Pittsburgh. He heard about the millions of dollars moving through the city banks just a few miles away.

He looked at the three dollars and fifty cents in his pocket. It was his pay for the entire week.

Samuel had arrived in New York a decade earlier from London. He stepped off the boat into a city tearing itself apart. He watched men fight for scraps of work on the docks.

The winter of 1877 hit the tenements hard. The cigar factory owners announced a city-wide pay cut. They didn't explain why.

A man two benches down started coughing blood onto the floorboards. The foreman told him to step outside so he wouldn't ruin the to***co leaf.

Samuel watched the man walk out into the snow. He didn't come back.

Samuel kept his head down and kept rolling. His fingers were stained dark brown from the ni****ne. He knew rolling faster wouldn't buy him a different life. It would just buy him a different bench.

He watched the men around him talking about revolution. They were angry. They were ready to burn the factories down. They held meetings in the streets.

Samuel listened. He knew anger wouldn't change the clock.

At the time, the legal framework in New York offered no mechanism for collective bargaining. According to court records from the 1870s, judges routinely classified organized worker protests as illegal conspiracies against trade. The law viewed a laborer not as a citizen negotiating a contract, but as a unit of property interfering with commerce. The system wasn't broken. It was functioning exactly as designed to protect industrial output.

The factory owners explained their math simply. A shorter workday meant less product. Less product meant less profit.

The machines and the real estate were expensive to maintain. The men were cheap to replace. The 1880 census counted millions of immigrants pouring into the city harbor.

The owners knew hunger was the most reliable manager in the world.

The gates stayed locked until the daily quota was met. If a man passed out from exhaustion, they dragged him into the alley. The system required bodies. It didn't care whose bodies they were.

The cigar makers finally walked out. The owners locked the doors and waited.

They didn't negotiate. They didn't send the police. They just let the cold do the work.

Three weeks later, the men came back. They were hungry. Their children were hungry. They accepted an even larger pay cut just to get their chairs back.

The foreman smiled and started the pocket watch.

Samuel realized something watching the men walk back through the doors. Strikes built on anger always starved. Anger didn't pay the rent. Idealism couldn't buy bread.

He stopped giving speeches about utopia. He started collecting dimes.

He told the men they needed a treasury. A war chest.

He organized only the skilled workers. The cigar makers, the carpenters, the printers, the bricklayers.

This was a cold calculation. He ignored the unskilled masses sweeping the floors or loading the docks. He knew the bosses could replace an unskilled man in ten minutes. They couldn't replace a master carpenter without stopping construction.

In December 1886, they met in a hall in Columbus, Ohio. They formed the American Federation of Labor.

Samuel didn't ask the politicians for favors. He didn't ask the bosses for pity.

He built a bureaucratic machine. He collected strict dues from every member. He hired accountants. He kept ledgers. He operated the union like a corporation.

His strategy was simple. He didn't want to overthrow capitalism. He just wanted a larger piece of it for the men doing the work. When asked what his movement wanted, he gave a one-word answer: "More."

In 1890, Samuel targeted the eight-hour workday. He didn't call for a general strike. That would drain the treasury too fast.

Instead, he picked one trade: the carpenters.

The American Federation of Labor funneled its money to the carpenters' union. When the carpenters walked out, they didn't starve. Samuel paid them from the ledger.

Construction across the country ground to a halt. Half-built buildings sat in the rain.

The bosses tried to wait them out again. They checked their bank accounts.

Samuel checked his ledger. He knew he had enough cash to wait longer.

The owners broke first. They needed the buildings finished. They signed the contracts. The carpenters won the eight-hour day.

The next year, Samuel picked the miners. The year after that, the bakers.

He used the same math every time. The hours dropped from fourteen to twelve. Then to ten. Then, eventually, to eight.

Samuel Gompers ran the federation until he died in 1924. By the time of his funeral, the American Federation of Labor had three million members. Millions of workers had Saturday afternoons off.

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the standard forty-hour workweek. Offices close at five.

The weekends are printed in red on calendars. Factory gates open on schedule.

The to***co dust is gone from the tenement on Houston Street. The building is a luxury apartment now.

Rent is due on the first of the month.

Source: Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (1925).
Verified via: The Samuel Gompers Papers (University of Maryland), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics archives.
(Some details summarized for brevity.)

02/20/2026

02/20/2026

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02/18/2026

New arrivals, La Aroma De Cuba.

01/28/2026

East Grand is clear for at least one lane almost two, going both directions. We will be open tomorrow 1/27 from 11:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. hopefully Thursday we will open normal hours 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. but it really depends on the weather. Be safe, stay warm. Hope to see you soon

12/13/2025

Happy holidays everyone! We will be open Christmas Eve from 10:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. we currently have a sale 25% off of any back stocked full boxes. We have a lot of cutters and lighters on sale as well. Our current hours are Wednesday through Saturday 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
I hope to see you soon!
And if I don't get to see you, I hope you have a very merry Christmas! 🎄 🎁

11/28/2025

11/27/2025

We will be open Black Friday from 10:00 until 6:00. We have huge markdowns on select items. If you purchase three Delicioso ci**rs you get a fourth Delicioso cigar for free. (While supplies last)

10/04/2025

Unnecessary, useless regulation by the federal government

Alexandria, Virginia (October 3, 2025) - Today, Cigar Rights of America, Rocky Patel Premium Ci**rs, Inc., Oliva Cigar Co., Piloto Ci**rs, Inc. d/b/a Padrón Ci**rs, Inc., A. Fuente & Co., LLC, Ashton Distributors, Inc., Premium Imports, Inc. d/b/a La Flor Dominicana, My Father Ci**rs, and the Premium Cigar Association, filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Central District of California challenging the application of California’s Unflavored To***co List (UTL) law to premium ci**rs as defined in the federal regulatory system. California’s Attorney General is claiming that, if premium ci**rs manufacturers do not submit a voluminous application for every size, shape, and blend of premium cigar by October 9, 2025, those ci**rs will need to be pulled off the shelves of retailers. In doing so, the Attorney General is trying to set himself up as a second Food and Drug Administration, in violation of numerous federal and state constitutional and statutory provisions.

If there is a point to the unflavored to***co list law, it is to help the Attorney General identify flavored to***co products. It has turned into one of the most expensive and useless regulatory mandates in the history of to***co regulation. And it makes no sense to run what the federal regulatory system has determined to be premium ci**rs through the process, as (under the federal definition) such ci**rs cannot be flavored.

From the outset, CRA has opposed these regulations because they unfairly penalize the premium cigar industry. The UTL was meant to address flavored products and youth use, yet the proposed rules saddle premium cigar manufacturers with excessive fees and paperwork. Despite recognition in the courts and by FDA that premium ci**rs are not flavored products, the Attorney General’s office is forcing thousands of legitimate ci**rs to prove otherwise through an arbitrary $12 wholesale price threshold. This needless requirement ignores established definitions and inflicts financial harm on a market segment wholly unrelated to the problem AB 3218 was designed to address.

Rocky Patel, President and CEO of Rocky Patel Premium Ci**rs and CRA Board Member said upon today's filing, "California’s regulations are arbitrary and capricious, usurious in practice, and serve as a de facto prohibition that slashes product availability, imposes outrageous compliance costs, and unfairly punishes good actors in the premium cigar industry. Instead of taking the time to understand this cottage industry and craft a practical solution, the Attorney General’s office chose a path that violates due process and fair business practices."

“CRA and Oliva Cigar Company are committed to protecting premium ci**rs wherever that road leads us,” said Cory Bappert, CEO of Oliva Cigar Company and CRA Vice-President. “We look forward to our day in court to challenge the unfair burden put on our industry by the state of California. To our California clients we hear you and help is on the way.”

Today’s filing is the crucial first step in our legal challenge to halt California’s UTL. CRA is fully committed to this action and will provide further updates as the case proceeds through the legal process.

To read a copy of today's filing, please click here.

About Cigar Rights of America (CRA)
Cigar Rights of America is a national non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the rights of the premium cigar community and advocating for balanced, common-sense regulation. CRA represents cigar manufacturers, retailers, and consumers across the United States.

Contact
Cody Carden
Director of Communications
[email protected]
202.844.4272