There's a story behind the wall in Hilary Jenkins' house, but first a word from its sponsor, because the wall -- before its message was entombed 100 years ago -- did have a sponsor:

CUBANOLA.

Now, on with the story, keeping in mind that, as with any archaeological dig, the mysteries -- both of that word and Jenkins' wall -- will become clearer as the layers of the past are brushed off.

First, go back five years. Jenkins, a furniture maker and woodcarver originally from England, has just bought the rowhouse in Canton. She quickly realizes she can't live with the wallpaper. It has to go, all five thicknesses of it -- one for every generation of owners and renters who have lived there.

Then, a year ago, Jenkins, wanting the exposed brick look, decided the plaster had to come off as well. Choosing a crowbar for the job, she began hacking at the wall in her living room, expecting to soon see red brick.

Instead she hit blue.

And then more blue -- not a calm, subdued kind of blue; more of an electric, aqua blue. "It has a presence," said Jenkins, 36. She was having her doubts about the blue when another whack of the crowbar revealed a patch of bright yellow.

As more plaster fell, the yellow took the shape of a cent sign, about 30 inches high. To the left of it emerged a gigantic "5." Underneath it were more yellow letters, nearly two feet high, running the length of her living room:

"C I G A R," they said.

Back near her stairway, the falling plaster exposed more, even larger letters. These were six feet tall, orange, outlined in black -- rising from the stairway and written at an upward angle: "B," then "A," then an "N" that disappeared into the ceiling.

Originally, Jenkins had just planned to knock off the plaster downstairs. "But by then I couldn't stop," she said. "Curiosity got the better of me."

Taking the crowbar upstairs, Jenkins continued, and so did the word, rising through the floor of her bedroom and climbing the wall: the rest of the "N," then "O," "L" and "A."

There were a few more words under the three-quarter-inch-thick plaster at the top of her stairs, one of which, after being interrupted by a partition, continued into her bedroom. They said:

"All Ha - - na

Filler "

It had taken a week, but after 10 pickup truck loads of plaster were removed and the dust had cleared, Jenkins, with the help of some friends, was able to fill in a couple of blanks and figure out what she had uncovered:

A blue, white, orange, black and yellow, two-story-high, hand-painted advertisement for Cubanola cigars, which cost 5 cents and were made with "all Havana filler."

Such signs were not unusual in the early 1900s. Flour, cigars, Coca-Cola and DeSotos were among hundreds of products advertised on the sides of stores, barns, factories, even the end units of rowhouses.

The sign painters, who roamed both city and countryside, were sometimes known as "wall dogs." The remnants of their work -- long-faded advertisements for often-defunct products -- are sometimes known as "ghost signs."

With its colors protected by a layer of plaster, Jenkins' sign may be the best-preserved "ghost sign" anywhere -- and one of the most mysterious.

Ghost signs are seldom found indoors, primarily because, under most building codes, adjoining structures require two walls between them. Generally, one building's outside wall is not supposed to be the neighboring building's inside wall.

It is stranger yet because rowhouses like Jenkins' -- hers is not an end unit -- were most often built a block at a time, leaving little opportunity for anyone to paint a sign on the side of one before another went up.

There is, though, at least one other case of a building owner uncovering outdoor advertising inside his building. Lee Pambid, an urban planner in South Boston, Va., while rehabbing a 90-year-old downtown building two years ago, began knocking plaster off an upstairs wall.

Once done, one word had clearly emerged, in large orange letters, outlined in black, rising up the wall at an angle:

CUBANOLA.

It's a plant. It's a song. It's a fusion of cultures.

But at one time -- back when Woodrow Wilson's vice president was bemoaning the lack of good ones -- Cubanola was a 5-cent cigar.

Initially, Lee Pambid didn't even know that -- the words "5-cent cigar" are most likely on the first floor brick, behind the wall covering he didn't remove.

"The sign was a surprise to everybody. Nobody remembered it being there," he said. "I guess I just haven't talked to people old enough to remember."

Pambid, as a child, took piano lessons in the building, then known as J.C. Howlett's Piano and Appliance. Later, it became a law office. After its restoration, the first floor became home to a dance studio and Pambid, a 30-year-old Marine reservist whose amphibious assault unit was activated last week, has been living upstairs.

He has named it "The Cubanola Building."

It turned out Pambid's building was built around 1910, in what was once an alleyway. It was built onto the side of what at the time was a grocery store, the outside wall of which bore a painted Cubanola sign.

Since uncovering the sign, he has noticed two more Cubanola signs in Richmond -- so faded that "they're about gone," he said -- and seen another pictured in a book.

He also heard from Daniel Seyler, who bought an old house in Phillipsburg, N.J., last year -- about the same time Jenkins began her renovations.

Across the back of Seyler's building -- a former tavern, he thinks -- he found the faint outline of a Cubanola banner.

Initially, Seyler thought it was an advertisement for an old ragtime song. Later, he realized it was for a cigar.

The signs that linger across the Northeast may be mostly washed out, but the history of Cubanolas is even fuzzier.

In interviews with cigar company executives, cigar experts, cigar sellers, no one could remember with certainty who made Cubanolas, or when they stopped.

Only one had an inkling, and was uncertain at that. "That was a Philadelphia brand, one of about 300,000 brands on the market at the turn of the century," said Tony Hyman, curator of the online National Cigar Museum.

"The signs are probably from the 1900-1910 window," Hyman said, and the brand probably lasted into the 1930s.

Although it is no longer manufactured, another cigar brand, Lord Beaconsfield, recently offered a "Cubanola." Other than the name, there is no connection between it and the turn-of-the-century cigar.

The Tobacco Merchants Association in Princeton, N.J., has records of old cigar brand trademarks but says they are in deep storage.

"One day somebody might see it has some historical significance, but for now we're just keeping it warm," a spokesman said.

Whether the word existed before it became a brand of cigar is also unknown. It is not an English word, a Spanish one, or even a Latin one, though it is part of the scientific name of a plant native to the Dominican Republic -- Cubanola domingensis, a shrub that produces bell-shaped, cream-colored flowers, but not tobacco.

The word is also used to describe the merging of Cuban and New Orleans cultures, styles and/or music.

Google Cubanola and almost all references are to the song, "The Cubanola Glide," written in 1909 by Harry von Tilzer. Its lyrics, written by Vincent Bryan, have nothing to do with cigars:

Get a way closer hon

Squeeze me tight

Rag-a-dag to de left

Den to de right

Shake it up, shake it up

Side by side

Cuddle right up to me

As we slide

Ain't it entrancin'

When you're a dancin'

Dat Cubanola Glide.

References to the cigar, meanwhile, though few, can be found as far back as 1895, when a Shelbyville, Ind., storekeeper placed this advertisement in the local paper.

"Ho, ye tobacco chewers. See our prices, and if you want a first class nickel cigar come this way and try John McCullough and Cubanola. There is nothing better."

Figuring out what Cubanola was, for Hilary Jenkins, was one thing. Figuring out how it originally got on her living room wall was another.

City property tax records list both Jenkins' house, at 1002 S. East Ave., and the one next to it, 1000 S. East Ave., as being built in 1880.

That would mean little or no time passed before the Cubanola sign, painted on the side of 1000 S. East Ave., was sandwiched between it and 1002.

It would also mean that the builders most likely circumvented installing the two rows of bricks between rowhouses required even then.

As it turns out, though, those records are wrong.

Based on title searches and a review of Sanborn maps, compiled since the late 19th century for fire insurance purposes, the house at 1000 S. East Ave. was built in the late 1890s. And Jenkins' house was not built until 1904.

All the houses on the side of the block are identical, the house at 1000 S. East stood alone for several years, contrary to normal rowhouse building procedure.

"That would be very uncommon," said Mark Cameron, executive director of the Neighborhood Design Center. "Some of the large ones were built one at a time, but normally they would come in and do a whole block at once."

Possibly, said Charles Belfoure, co-author of The Baltimore Rowhouse, construction on the row of houses was interrupted after the first one was built by a depression that hit Baltimore in the late 1890s, bringing most building to an abrupt halt.

"Thousands were thrown out of work," he said. "It's possible that building just stopped, and somebody wanted to make some money so they let somebody put a sign there."

According to microfilmed copies of handwritten deeds on file in the courthouse, the property at 1000 S. East Ave. was first leased in 1895 to Charles L. Baumbach, and his wife Matilda by the Canton Company, which developed much of the housing for the burgeoning number of factory workers in Canton, then the city's industrial heart.

Baumbach is listed in old city directories as a grocer, whose store and residence was located across the street, on the southeast corner of Dillon and East. While he held the lease on 1000 S. East -- still the only house on that side of the block in 1902 -- it was occupied that year, according to Sanborn maps, by a barber.

Apparently, Baumbach sub-leased the property, and around the same time, its side wall.

Advertisers were on the lookout for brick walls with good vantage points. Most often the signs advertised a nationally or regionally available product, and in exchange for allowing use of the wall, would include, in smaller letters, the name of the establishment where it was available.

Just last week, the words "groceries" and "dry" (probably part of dry goods) were found painted in Jenkins' attic, indicating the Cubanola sign mentioned the grocery store, most likely Baumbach's across the street.

In any event, by 1904, when 1002 S. East Ave. was sold to its first owners, Frank and Katherine Martens, the Cubanola sign at 1000 S. East had disappeared behind the plaster wall of the new house next door.

In 1916, Baumbach sold the house, for $800 to Elizabeth Ortt, who apparently rented it out. It was sold again in 1933 and in 1946, when it was purchased by James and Anna Schepling, who, according to city directories, had lived there since 1929 as tenants.

Two residents of the block, including one whose grandfather used to talk about patronizing the establishment, said 1000 S. East was a speakeasy in the 1920s during Prohibition.

No one remembers Baumbach's grocery store -- if it was even called that -- but several recall the grocery operated by a couple named Klein in the 1930s and '40s, including John Cain, City Council member from Canton, local history buff and fan of ghost signs.

"People just get rid of them, and it's a shame. It's a lack of appreciation. These are unique things that almost don't exist anymore," he said.

Much like the signs, Cain says, large chunks of the history of the neighborhood have faded away as well.

"Because it was worker housing, the details of who built what were never saved, unlike the case with neighborhoods like Mount Vernon and Roland Park."

Jenkins says she has no intention of getting rid of the sign but can't guarantee its future: She is selling the house.

With rising assessments, her tax bills are getting too high. And with Canton's hot real estate market, the potential profit is too great to pass up. She bought the house for $65,000 five years ago, put $18,000 into renovating it (not counting her labor) and has it on the market for $215,000.

By selling it, she says, she will be able to continue working as a free-lance furniture maker in her own studio.

Jenkins came to the United States 16 years ago, originally on a vacation. She got married and divorced, attended Maryland Institute College of Art and the University of Maryland, got a degree in interior design and apprenticed with a furniture maker before going into business on her own as a furniture designer and builder.

She renovated the house herself, following the basic formula for what sells in Canton: hardwood floors and exposed brick. (Preservationists warn against removing original plaster from old homes, saying it decreases historic value and can result in losing the state historic tax credit.)

She has not touched up the wall, except for plugging the holes left by the nails that, spaced every six inches, helped hold the plaster on. After filling the holes, she used a wet rag and was able to pick up enough pigment from the old paint to cover them.

While she has determined that there are two rows of brick between her house and her neighbor's -- apparently the builder got a second row on before the hiatus -- Jenkins is unsure if the sign contains lead. She plans on testing it and covering it with a clear sealer if it does.

"It's definitely lead paint," said William Stage, a St. Louis journalist and the author of Ghost Signs: Brick Wall Signs in America.

In addition to other dangers of the job -- like working at extreme heights on flimsy scaffolding -- "wall dogs" had to mix their own paints, adding white lead, which led to illness and deformities among some, Stage says.

Stage said he had never heard of a ghost sign showing up on an inside wall.

"Usually when you hear about it, it's the other side," he said. "Like when a building is torn down and it exposes the exterior wall of another building that had been covered up."

For every new sign that reappears from the past, though, hundreds more, like the products they often advertise, fully fade away, as ephemeral as 5-cent cigars and sometimes history itself.

There is one last, teasing clue to the hazy history of Jenkins' CUBANOLA sign. The name of the sign company, though obscured, is written in small letters in the bottom right-hand corner.

"------ Sign Co." it says.

"13 North G ------"

The rest disappears into the woodwork.