Antique Harveys Nat Leaf Tobacco Tin Tag 🚬 1870s 1910s Figural Leaf Shape Prong Back Advertising Collectible Tobacciana

Harvey's Nat. Leaf Tin Tobacco Tag 🍂 A Little Leaf with a Mustache

Size: 1 1/2" x 1/2"

This little guy is shaped like a tobacco leaf, veins and all, with HARVEYS on one side, NAT. LEAF on the other, and a fellow with a big mustache and a necktie in a round portrait right in the middle. It's lithographed tin, orange-gold or yellow depending on the batch, with the original prongs on the back. I have a few of them, and you'll get one like the ones shown.

🔍 What It Was For

Tags like this were pushed through a plug of chewing tobacco and bent over on the back, so the storekeeper and the chewer both knew whose plug it was. "Nat. Leaf" is natural leaf - plain tobacco without the heavy sweetening a lot of plugs carried. Plenty of makers sold one: R.J. Reynolds, which had bought P. H. Hanes & Co. of Winston in 1900, bragged in 1902 that life-long chewers of natural leaf called Hanes' Natural Leaf "without an equal."

Tin tags ran from roughly the 1870s into the 1920s, when chewers were turning into cigarette smokers.

How the whole thing got started is on record in the federal courts. In 1874 Charles Seidler, one of the partners at P. Lorillard & Co. - the New York tobacco house that went back to 1760 - came up with pressing a metal tag right into the face of a plug, and he had a patent on it by January 1875. Lorillard said it needed the tags because dealers were emptying its boxes and refilling them with somebody else's tobacco, and it colored the tags by brand so a man could walk in and ask for "red tin tag" or "blue tin tag." Folks took to calling the whole line "Tin Tag Tobacco," and Lorillard went to court to keep everybody else's tin off the plugs. It lost. In 1879 a federal judge in Pennsylvania threw out the heart of the patent, saying that putting prongs on the underside of a flat disk - the same little prongs on the back of this tag - wasn't an invention, and in 1886 a judge in Illinois ruled that nobody could own a piece of tin as a trademark, whatever its shape or color. Liggett & Myers of St. Louis was already tagging its plugs with tin stars, and from then on every maker was free to cut its own shape. Collectors have listed more than 12,000 different tags since.

🤔 Who Was Harvey?

The tag doesn't print a maker or a town, but the old newspapers do. A 1910 ad in The Jeffersonian, a Georgia paper, spelled it out: "Be a gentleman and chew good tobacco." Rich and Ripe was "for professional men," HARVEYS NATURAL LEAF was "for nervous people," and the whole lineup was "made by The Whitaker-Harvey Co., Winston-Salem, N.C." The Whitaker-Harvey name was still on tobacco ads in a Mississippi paper in 1912.

The Whitaker was William Asbury Whitaker, born in Yadkin County, North Carolina, in 1843. He came out of the Civil War a Confederate major, sold tobacco down in Georgia in the early 1870s for the Yadkin County manufacturer Joseph A. Bitting, then came to Winston as Bitting's partner and married the boss's daughter, Anna Bitting, in 1881. When Bitting died, Whitaker took over, and later he formed Whitaker-Harvey with Thomas Rucker and William L. Harvey. He also sat on Winston's first school board, helped open its first graded school, started its first electric power and streetcar company, and died in 1912. His son John C. Whitaker joined R.J. Reynolds in 1913, ran the very first machine that made Camel cigarettes, and ended up chairman of the board - Reynolds named its Whitaker Park plant for him.

And Harvey? In November 1896 the Lowndesville, South Carolina column of the Abbeville Press and Banner reported that "W. L. Harvey, 'natural leaf man,'" had been through in a rig that drew "much attention wherever it goes" - a vast improvement, the writer said, on the old way tobacco venders got around. By November 1897 a grocer's ad in the Anderson Intelligencer had Harvey's Natural Leaf right next to Drummond's Natural Leaf, and Anderson ads from 1903 through 1905 kept naming "Harveys Natural Leaf and Rich and Ripe" among the best-known chews around - one of them calling Whitaker-Harvey the maker of both.

The company had a rough winter in 1902. On December 11 a fire that started in a knitting mill burned four three-story brick buildings in Winston, Whitaker-Harvey's plant among them, and the News and Observer called it one of the most disastrous fires in the town's history. A month later Whitaker-Harvey merged with S. A. Ogburn's tobacco plant, kept its own name, put in new machinery for three times the working capacity of the two old plants, and planned a big new factory on the burned lot. Harvey's Natural Leaf hung on a long time after that - in April 1925 a storekeeper in the Chesterfield, South Carolina paper was still advertising bargains in Harveys Natural Leaf on his counter.

I've dug, and I haven't found who the man in the medallion is. There's an old collector rumor that some of these portraits weren't anybody in particular, just a respectable-looking gentleman to make the plug look trustworthy. Maybe that's him. Maybe it's Mr. Harvey.

📜 The Stories

The story collectors pass down is that P. Lorillard & Co. of New Jersey's first tin tags were tucked under the outer leaf of the plug where nobody could see them, and it was Ben Finzer of Louisville who started putting them on the outside. People collected the tags in their own day, and they were worth something: R.J. Reynolds' 1902 premium catalogue offered a pair of scissors for 35 tags and a piano for 58,000 tags, and told folks to count their tags, bundle each kind separately and send them in by mail or express - and the legend goes that out in the country, where cash was short, a pocketful of tags could pass as a little bit of change.

A fun one for a tobacciana collection, a little frame, or anybody named Harvey!