Antique 1920s American Beauty Eatmor Cranberries Barrel Label ✨ NY, NJ, CHI

Who Packed American Beauty Eatmor Cranberries? 🌹 American Beauty Brand, Eatmor Cranberries of New Jersey

Size: 10" x 6 3/4" ~ Little to no wear.

A big crimson rose on a cranberry label, and there's a reason for it. This is an antique 1920s American Beauty Brand label for a quarter-barrel box of Eatmor Cranberries of New Jersey, packed for the American Cranberry Exchange of New York and Chicago, never pasted on a box.

🔍 What's on it

Eatmor Cranberries in big navy letters across the top, of NEW JERSEY under it, and in the middle an oval with a full red rose, a rosebud and dark green leaves. Down each side, in red on white, AMERICAN BEAUTY BRAND. Then ONE FOURTH U.S. STANDARD BARREL, PACKED FOR THE AMERICAN CRANBERRY EXCHANGE, NEW YORK, CHICAGO, and a blank box marked PACKER'S NUMBER, where the grower who packed the berries wrote in their own number. All of it on a soft yellow ground with red and navy borders. The back is plain, with the rose showing through.

🌹 Why a rose?

The brand is named for the most famous rose in America. It was bred in France in 1875 as 'Madame Ferdinand Jamin,' brought over and introduced here as the American Beauty in 1886, and it was the best-selling rose in the United States until the 1920s. At two dollars a stem or more, it was called the million-dollar rose. Naming your best cranberries after it was saying something.

🍒 Eatmor and the American Cranberry Exchange

Cranberry growers in New Jersey and Massachusetts formed the Growers' Cranberry Company in 1895, with Joseph J. White of Whitesbog, New Jersey among its founders, and by 1896 it was even shipping cranberries to Europe. In 1911 the growers' groups of New Jersey, New England and Wisconsin came together as the American Cranberry Exchange, headquartered at 90 West Broadway in New York with a branch in Chicago, and White was its first president. The Exchange started using the name Eatmor in 1916 and put real money behind it, with national advertising in magazines like Good Housekeeping and Better Homes & Gardens. By its own count, those ads lifted the average price growers got from about $6 a barrel to nearly $10.

"Eatmor" wasn't just a name, it was a grade. Whitesbog, White's old cranberry village in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, keeps an American Beauty label in its collection, and its record gives the Eatmor standard: at least 90 percent colored berries, no more than 125 berries to the cup, and fruit that would hold up for 15 days of travel. Whitesbog is famous for another berry too: Joseph's daughter, Elizabeth C. White, worked with the USDA's Frederick Coville to bring in the first cultivated blueberry crop there in 1916.

The Exchange moved its headquarters to New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1951, renamed itself Eatmor Cranberries, Inc. in 1953, and voted to dissolve in Chicago on June 10, 1957.

📅 How old is it?

The quarter-barrel cranberry box came in around 1926, and the Boston Public Library dates this American Beauty label, along with its New Jersey sister labels, to the 1920s. Some American Beauty printings add a "Product of the U.S. of America" line and some say "Standard Cranberry Barrel"; this one reads plain "Standard Barrel," with no origin line.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! It's perfect framed in a kitchen, and a great one to bring out every Thanksgiving.

Old labels like this are a reminder of a bygone era, and the lithography on them is unparalleled even to this day, in my opinion. Museums have galleries of them, and more and more collectors are seeking them out to preserve their history. They aren't making any more vintage labels, obviously, so once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.