Antique 1890s Butterfly Brand Boston Marrow Squash Can Label 🦋 Olney & Floyd Packers, Oneida County NY

Who Packed Butterfly Brand Squash? 🦋 Butterfly Brand Boston Marrow Squash

Size: 14" x 4 1/2"

A big golden squash on one end and a gorgeous butterfly on the other. This is an antique Butterfly Brand can label for Boston Marrow Squash, packed by Olney & Floyd at Westernville, Oneida County, New York, never wrapped around a can. The Henry Ford museum in Michigan has this very same label in its collection.

🔍 What's on it

A long wraparound can label. One end reads FIRST QUALITY, Butterfly BRAND, with a big moth-winged butterfly resting in the grass, then OLNEY & FLOYD, PACKED AT, TRADE MARK and WESTERNVILLE ONEIDA CO, N.Y.; the other end has Butterfly BRAND again over a huge squash in its leaves and BOSTON MARROW SQUASH. The back is plain.

🏭 Olney & Floyd

G.B. Olney and C.F. Floyd started a vegetable canning plant in Westernville, New York in the 1880s, and it grew fast. They canned corn, succotash, beans, peas, pumpkin, squash, tomatoes, spinach and beets, with factories at Westernville, Delta and Lee Center. In 1891 alone they put up 400,000 cans of corn at Delta and as many again at Westernville, and at their peak they had more than 200 people working for them. Every can went out under the same butterfly: the Henry Ford museum uses Olney & Floyd as its example of a brand that put one signature picture on all its products so customers could spot it on the shelf, and it dates this squash label to between 1890 and 1920.

The family didn't stop at canning. In 1909 G.B.'s son, George J. Olney, started building better machinery for the family's factory. His first patent, in 1915, was the Olney Mixer, which measured corn, beans and syrup and mixed and preheated them for the cans, and in 1920 the first Olney pea washer went to work in the Olney & Floyd factory at Lee Center. That grew into the G.J. Olney Company, which went on making vegetable cleaning and grading machinery for processors from Japan and New Zealand to Europe and Australia, run by three more generations of Olneys after George died in 1974.

🎃 Boston Marrow, a squash with a story

Boston Marrow is an old American winter squash, orange-fleshed and famous for pies. The story goes that in the spring of 1831 a band of Native Americans visiting Buffalo, New York gave the seed to a local gardener, who passed it to a friend in Northampton, Massachusetts, who passed it to J.M. Ives of North Salem, who shared it with the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and from there it spread all over New England. Nobody has ever proven the Buffalo part, but it's the story that came with the seed.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! It's a real showpiece framed long in a kitchen, and a perfect fall piece next to a pumpkin label or two.

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. Old stock like this doesn't come back. Once the supply for sale is gone and these labels are framed in homes and galleries, they will be very hard to get.