We are Battleground Cigar, founded in Hazardville CT by Michael Tarnowicz in 2000. We are a boutique cigar created with the beautiful history of our home state Connecticut and our vast surroundings of U.S. History.
We are an honest family owned business , wanting to create an authentic CT cigar leaf and premium filler cigar . Our theme is simple, our countries US Civil War history and CT tobacco History, combined to create a unique botique cigar that will know will be up to premuim standards.
We are a small company , but we are growing and evolving so that we may bring you a different smoking experience from the norm. We bring everything from traditional Ct Shade and Broadleaf wrapper to Coroji Maduro, Brazilian, and Nicaraguan wrapper, to the very different Bourbon and Irish Whiskey Infused and Louisiana perique blended premium cigars.
We are humble, we are honest, we are American, we are BATTLEGROUND CIGAR.
Connecticut may not be known for its cigars, but it is known for flavorful shade-grown wrapping. And the brands creator and shop owner Michael Tarnowicz, is betting that the mestique surrounding of the Civil war gunpowder manufacturer, will set the cigars apart. Old Powderkeg, one of the strongest cigars Tarnowicz sells, is names after Col.Augustus Hazard, who supplies the Union with gunpowder during the war. Hazard's mill was within range of Tarnowicz's store in Hazardville in Enfield that takes its name from the Colonel.
The American cigar-making industry started after Gen.Israel Putnam returned from Cuba in 1762 with three donkey loads of hand rolled cigars. Thier popularity grew. The first cigar factory in the United States opened in Suffield, CT in 1810.
Tarnowicz opened his shop in 1996, in an old pharmacy whose second floor once had been a meeting spot-and cigar smoking room-for members of the Hazardville Fire Department. He had just been laid off from his job as a purchasing manager for United Technologies.
The store's Civil war theme started , when Tarnowicz hung upa springfield musket. A patron donated a frame photograph of Gen. Robert E. Lee, a retired gunsmith, restored another of Tarnowicz's muskets-a colt- in exchange for cigars.... AND SO IT BEGAN, the venture to the creation of Battleground Cigar.
It's only fitting that Tarnowicz's Battleground line of cigars, which features heroes from the North and South, seems to be selling best.
Tarnowicz shops around the globe for what he needs. The wooden boxes are made from his own hands, the cigar filler frim Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, and Hondurus, the artwork made in in collaboration will a local artist, the Broadleaf and shade tobacco he uses to bind and wrap his ciagrs come from mostly Stephen Jarmoc and John Bates from Windsor, who live only miles away from his shop.
.......American made, American proud.
