The history of Retnuh the Cigar Store Indian  from Hunter's Cigar Store in Beardstown, Illinois.

(This article was featured in the Illinoian Star Newspaper, Beardstown Illinois) 

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      The Hunter family lived above the Main Street factory and Hunter Jr., grew up in the company of cigar makers. His father, realizing cigar making was a dying business, discouraged his son from following in his footsteps.

   "Although I knew how to make cigars, my father would never let me work. He knew the cigar business was dying, being bought by large manufactures, and didn't want to encourage me." remembers Charles Jr. 

   Tobacco however stayed in the blood of Hunter.

   He would daily watch the women of the factorystrip stems from large leaves of three different kinds of tobacco. Each kind of tobacco had a different originand function in the making of a Hunter's Best Cigar. To a youg boy the process was both interesting and exotic.

   With every year that passed, access to the all-important tobacco was lessening for the Hunters.

   The large manufactures were outbidding small men on quality tobacco', said  Hunter.

   The patriarch of the company, Charles K Hunter I, died in 1937. Before his death he was forced to have Frank Winters make his Hunter's Best Cigars for the widowed Mrs. Ella M. Hunter till 1942 when he too went out of business. Hunter Cigar Store began and continued to stock the available larger brands of cigars and tobacco. 

    In the 1943 flood scare, Mr. Hunter patrolled the overloaded levees while his wife and her sister busily packed the stores sundries upstairs. Retnuh was evacuated to the inside of the cigar store and besides a few brief photographic sessions, has never seen Main Street again.

   Since the early thirties, Hunter Cigar Store stocked and sold magazines and written matter. The end of the wholesale cigar business and the decline of snuff and the stogie prompted the Hunters to further expand their inventory.

   Charles K. Hunter II took over the store in 1954 when his mother retired. Newspapers, magazines, paperbacks and personal accessories of every description began filling the space once occupied by the cigar factory. In 1963 the cieling, front and store interior underwent relatively major remodeling. The store looks today much as it did in 1963.  Throught the 65 years of business in Beardstown, Hunter's Cigar Store was busily acquiring an invaluable product. It was becoming a Beardstown institution. 

   The men of Beardstown gather round dark tables in the back of Hunter's to blow smoke and pass the talk of the town. Here the pulse of the city can easily be taken. Not far from the bustling chat and small town commerce, stans the silent red sentinel, 'Retnuh' . Expression frozen, he has heard and seen it all before.