Antique Crane's Imported Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Indianapolis, IN 1900s - 1920s

A Gold Crane Hung Out Like an Inn Sign 🚬 An Antique 1900s - 1920s Crane's Imported Embossed Cigar Box Label, House of Crane, Indianapolis

Size: 5 1/4" x 2 3/4"

CRANE'S IMPORTED is the only thing it says, in cream capitals across a red band at the bottom. Above it, a gold crane stands in a red oval that hangs like an old inn sign from a gilt scroll bracket, with a doorway on one side and, on the other, a tropical shore with palms full of red fruit and mountains behind - the period's way of saying the leaf came from somewhere warm and far away. It's embossed and gilded, deep enough that the name reads backward on the back, and it's never been on a box.

🏙️ The House of Crane

Crane's Imported is catalogued by collectors as a House of Crane brand, and the gold crane on red is their device: the Indiana Album keeps an unused House of Crane cigar band from Indianapolis, about 1920, with a gold crane on black and red. The House of Crane signed its own checks "Cigar Importers and Jobbers" - a jobber bought cigars in volume, put his own brands on them and sold them on to the stores across Indiana and beyond. They left a good paper trail: checks on the Fletcher American National Bank of Indianapolis dated 1916, 1917, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1929, 1932 and 1936, an invoice from 1913, leather advertising coin purses with the name stamped in, and labels like this one. The story goes their slogan was "If it comes from The House of Crane, it's a good cigar."

Their home was an Italianate building on South Meridian Street that Edward Beck put up in 1866 and 1867 for wholesalers of liquor, hats, clothes, coffee and hardware. The House of Crane moved into the south half in 1911, took the whole building in 1916 and remodeled it, putting in prism-glass transoms to throw daylight deep into the store, and sold cigars wholesale there for nearly seventy years. The building came down in 1990, but its front was saved and built into Circle Centre.

That stretch of South Meridian is part of the Indianapolis Wholesale District, which grew up during the Civil War around Union Station and supplied the city and central Indiana with everything from groceries to millinery until after the Second World War. It's the biggest group of late 1800s and early 1900s commercial buildings left in Indianapolis, and it's been on the National Register of Historic Places since July 14, 1982. Indianapolis had become a railroad crossroads early - the first line, from Madison, opened in 1847 - and that's what made it a wholesale town.

🚬 Cigars everywhere

Around 1900 an estimated four out of five American men smoked cigars, and something like two billion cigar bands were sold in this country in 1900 alone. The bands have their own legends: the story goes that Catherine the Great had her cigars wrapped in silk so they wouldn't stain her fingers, and that the paper rings went on cigars shipped to England to keep gentlemen's white gloves clean. People collected bands and labels by the album, the way they collected stamps.

🖨️ How it was made

By 1892 label printers were running 38-ton presses with machined dies to emboss labels like this one and finishing the raised parts in 22-karat gold or bronze leaf, over color laid down from a separate Bavarian limestone for each ink - as many as 25 stones on the fanciest work. By the 1920s the trade had gone over to quick four-color printing, and nobody makes them this way anymore.

📅 How old is it?

Nothing on it is dated. The House of Crane was on South Meridian from 1911, its gold-crane band is dated about 1920, and stone-and-die work like this ran out in the 1920s - so I've always had it as 1900s - 1920s.

🐦 About these labels

Every one I have is unused, 5 1/4 by 2 3/4 inches, gold still bright. It's a natural for anybody from Indianapolis, a Hoosier history wall, a den or a cigar room. The supply is finite - the House of Crane is long gone, nobody embosses labels like this anymore, and once these last ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.