Museum Schimmelpenninck Cigars - Dodewaard

For centuries, Wageningen had a thriving tradition of tobacco cultivation and processing, partly thanks to the sandy soils along the northern bank of the Rhine, which were suitable for domestic tobacco. Although cultivation largely disappeared around 1890, the city continued as a centre of the cigar industry and home-based work related to tobacco stripping.

The cigar factory Schimmelpenninck, officially “Geurts & van Schuppen”, grew into the largest cigar factory in Wageningen. The company was founded in the early twentieth century and had around 700 employees in 1939, producing more than 32 million cigars annually.

After the Second World War, Schimmelpenninck recovered, but from the late 1960s onwards, interest in cigars declined. The company had to reorganise, moved parts of the production to Belgium and eventually closed the Wageningen factory permanently in 2000.

In Dodewaard, Ben Beumer has set up a small-scale museum in his garden, where he has quickly brought together a rich collection of materials from the Schimmelpenninck factory. You’ll find packaging, cigar bands, corporate gifts and documentation that show what the brand produced and how important it was in the local tobacco industry.