Tobacco Road owner blowing rings around competitors
MANSFIELD — After 21 years operating downtown on the square, Tobacco Road recently moved to a new and bigger location at 87 Park Avenue West, across from the Holiday Inn.
Owner Jeff Walls said when he was growing up his father Robert started a pipe business in 1945 in his basement. It’s where he 
learned the trade.
In 1974, Walls said his father set him up in a pipe business, where he worked part-time until 1984 when he went full time to the pipe repair and pipe making operations.
“Pipes were his hobby,” Walls said. “My father was very good at what he did.”
In 1988, Walls decided he would open a tobacco store. There had been a tobacco store in the Richland Mall but it closed in 1979.
“So I started Tobacco Road from scratch,” Walls said.
He drove to Chattanooga, Tenn., and bought out the merchandise and display cases in a tobacco store which was closing.
“I moved everything to Mansfield,” he said.
Traveling to conventions, Walls said he met a lot of older men who owned tobacco stores around the country and they mentored him.
While his business still focuses on tobacco, he has a license for beer and wine carryout. He specializes in some premium wines, which goes hand-in-hand with the premium cigars he sells.
“Being downtown in this urban area I have learned how to cater to the people that not only work down here but live around me. At my store, whether you’re a pipe smoker or cigar smoker, it doesn’t take long until I know your name,” Walls said. “This is a very friendly store. I’ve always wanted to have a very friendly store and I’ve always wanted to know my customers.”
The new store features a walk-in humidor, plenty of pipe tobacco and pipes, cigars and cigarettes. All liquor and tobacco is sold at state minimum prices, Walls said.
“I mix-up pipe tobacco. We sell a lot of pipe tobacco,” he said. “My house blend is my No. 1 seller. If you want premium pipe tobacco in Mansfield, you have to come to Tobacco Road. There’s nowhere else.”
Walls enjoys giving his customers knowledge about the tobacco industry and its products. Most of the pipe tobacco he sells is grown in the Carolinas. He carries premium cigars from the Dominican Republic, Nicara-gua and Honduras.
He carries a sought-after cigar, the Padron.
When he isn’t tending to customers, Walls is making or repairing pipes.
Photographs on his store walls detail local tobacco history, including a photograph inside the city’s J.R. Rigby Cigar Co. showing the factory and children working there in the 1920s.
His late father was featured in a News Journal article in 1956. Walls was pictured with Mickey Rooney at a cigar convention. In another, he’s standing next to David Letterman.
“My business is really my hobby but I don’t take it lightly,” he said.
Walls said his wife Connie helps him with all decision making.
“She helped me find this place,” he said.
lwhitmire@nncogannett.com 419-521-7223
By LOU WHITMIRE, News Journal, November 22, 2009
