Maine Company Loses Contract Making Wooden Cigar Tips, Forced To Shut Its Doors

By Ted Cohen/Maine Wire

For decades a Burnham, Maine company that made golf tees and wooden toys has kept hundreds of people employed.

But it's now lost its biggest contract - making wooden cigar tips, that is marking the death knell for Pride Manufacturing.

The company has announced it is going out of business in April, putting 115 people out of work.

“After our largest customer made the decision to relocate their sourcing for cigar tips, our highest volume product, the facility became financially unviable,” the firm said in a statement.

The company has been a world leader in cigar tips for more than 60 years, and also cranks out millions of golf tees from white and yellow birch.

But Pride’s most-well-known product internationally has actually been a popular children's toy called Lincoln Logs.

Toymaker Basic Fun says it's now scrambling to find a new factory to manufacture the logs.

“We are desperately looking for a vendor here that manufactures custom wood parts,” Jay Foreman, Basic Fun’s chief executive, told The New York Post. “We are hoping that someone will purchase the factory or buy the equipment, but we are not counting on it for this year.”

Lincoln Logs were first created 110 years ago by a son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Pride was founded in Florida in 1930 before moving to Maine in 1956 to be closer to the wood it used to produce the cigar tips, and it started making golf tees soon after and then, more recently, the toy logs.

Maine Wire photo