The Virgin Islands Cigar Society was a members’ club on St. Thomas built around a featured cigar, the Rey Gregorio. I found it by following a promo box on the March 2001 latchon.com home page: a photo of a cigar box captioned “The Rey Gregorio, The Finest Caribbean Cigars,” linking to vics.latchon.com. That domain was Latchon’s own server space, the same setup used for the Fayetteville Independent Automobile Dealer Association site (fiada.latchon.com) linked from the same page, which has its own write-up now: fiada.latchon.com.
The site itself names Latchon directly: every page footer reads “This site is maintained by Latchon Multimedia, Inc.” And the members page lists “Roman D. Clarkson” by name, among about two dozen named members and Bellows International Ltd. The earliest Wayback capture is from March 2001, just after I left Latchon, and the pages still carry a February 2000 “last updated” date and a 1999-2000 copyright, so the site was built during my time there.
It is a FrontPage 98/2000 site using a packaged theme named “vics,” a FrontPage hit counter, and a DHTML animation script for the page transitions. The order form let members buy the Rey Gregorio by the box, and a “Blowin’ Smoke” newsletter page was still marked “under construction.”
