Martinez-Ybor encouraged other cigar manufacturers to open factories in Tampa to further increase the pool of workers, and welcomed entrepreneurs who founded businesses in the area. He himself established a variety of other businesses catering to the growing community, including a brewery, a hotel, an ice factory, a gas company, a brick factory, an insurance company, and Tampa's first streetcar line, among other ventures. Martinez-Ybor's plan worked. After a slow start, both his businesses and Ybor City as a whole flourished, with the area's cigar factories hand-rolling and shipping tens of millions of cigars annually by the late 1880s, the number increasing into the hundreds of millions by the turn of the 20th century. Ybor City was annexed by the city of Tampa in 1887 and helped the once small and struggling town grow into an important manufacturing and shipping center by the early 1900s. The role of Martinez-Ybor in helping to build industry in Tampa is covered in displays at the Ybor City Museum State Park. Martinez-Ybor married Palmia Learas while living in Cuba in 1848, and they had four children before her death. He married Mercedes de las Revillas in 1862, and they had eight children together. Martinez-Ybor also moved his family to Tampa upon establishing Ybor City, and several of his descendants still live in the area. Martinez-Ybor's role in initiating Tampa's phenomenal growth in population and wealth in the late 1890s was widely acknowledged and appreciated during his lifetime. After his death in Tampa on December 14, 1896, the headline of the Tampa Tribune read "Great Benefactor Gone" and many of the businesses in town closed in his honor for his funeral. He owned so many business ventures and real estate in the area that his partners concluded that there was not enough available capital in Tampa to turn his assets into money. His family eventually did sell off his holdings, but it took almost 10 years. Vicente Martinez-Ybor is interred in St. Louis Catholic Cemetery section of Oaklawn Cemetery in downtown Tampa. In honor of his contributions to the area's development, streets and schools are named for him, and his likeness is displayed as several pieces of public art, most notably a statue at Centro Ybor on 7th Avenue in Ybor City and a bronze bust on the Tampa Riverwalk near the Tampa Bay History Center.