Raymond Steber

From cigars to politics to astronomy, Raymond Steber was an influential man in Warren.

Steber ran the F.A. Steber Cigar Company — capable of producing 40,000 cigars in one day — at 319 Water St. (now Pennsylvania Avenue), according to “The Observatory that Was” by Mary Putnam, in the May 2015 edition of Stepping Stones, courtesy of the Warren County Historical Society.

The company opened in 1874 and employed 50 people by 1935.

The cigar business was not Ray Steber’s cup of tea, according to his granddaughter.

“Back in the very early 1980s, on a visit to Warren from Tasmania, I learnt from my grandfather that a PhD student was conducting oral history interviews with people in Warren — my grandfather included — about their recollections of the cigar and tobacco industry in Pennsylvania,” Liz Webster said.

She returned to Warren in 1985, shortly after her grandfather’s death, and visited the historical society to do some digging into her family history.

The Historical Society executive director at that time was Chase Putnam. The curator was Derek McKown.

“A pleasant man who may have been the then director/curator told me a story about what that PhD researcher had told him about our grandfather, who was humorous, but often extremely frank,” she said.

“Well now, Mr. Steber, what are your strongest recollections of the cigar industry?” the interviewer asked. “My grandfather had replied: ‘I hated every minute of it, and when the Depression came along, I got the Hell out!”

“He had studied classics at Amherst, had been in student theatre, Glee Club and a barbershop quartet, and was not comfortable as a manufacturer,” Webster said. “Loyalty to his father, Fredrick Augustus Steber, had kept him there.”

The Steber factory closed in 1938 and Raymond went to work in the trust department at Warren Bank & Trust.

Steber served as the Burgess of the Borough of Warren (like the mayor of a city) from 1933 through 1938. The existing municipal building was constructed during his term as burgess and he is credited with approving the use of daylight saving time in the borough in 1937, according to Putnam.