Antique 1900s - 1920s The Round-Up Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Bulls, Steers, Western Decor!

What Was The Round-Up Cigar? 🐂 The Round-Up: A Steer Busting Through the Paper

Size: 9" x 6 1/2"

Antique Vintage The Round-Up Embossed Cigar Label, Bulls, Steers, 1900s - 1920s! This one has attitude. A big black longhorn steer, head down and horns out, comes crashing right through a torn silver paper hoop, and the whole scene is roped in by a gold lasso whose loose end curls off to the side like the cowboy just let go of it. THE ROUND-UP arches across the top in raised gold letters with a little flourish at the end, and down at the bottom sits a fancy gold monogram, two C's wound together with & Co.

The design sits a little above the middle of a big cream sheet, the kind cigar makers laid right on top of the cigars inside the box, which collectors call a top sheet. Turn it over and the back is blank, with the steer, the rope and the lettering all pressed through in reverse.

These have very minor wear at most, none on the image. Don't think you would notice it on display or in a frame but please see pictures and videos and judge for yourself.

🤠 What a Round-Up Was

Out on the open range, cattle from a lot of different ranches grazed together, and the only way to tell whose was whose was the brand, burned on with a hot iron while the animals were still calves. So ranchers held a round-up, usually in the spring, to gather the herd, find the new calves for branding and cut out the grown cattle headed for sale. It took the best riders on the best horses. The cutters rode specially trained cutting horses that could stop and turn faster than any other horse, and every cowboy needed three or four fresh mounts a day. Between 1866 and 1895 some 10 million head were driven north out of Texas on trails like the Chisholm and the Western to the Kansas railheads, bound for the stockyards of Chicago.

Later on the word went from ranch work to show business. Ranchers in Pendleton, Oregon held the first Pendleton Round-Up in 1910, and it still draws about 50,000 people every September. A cigar called The Round-Up, with a steer tearing through the paper, was selling that same Wild West spirit to smokers who had never swung a rope in their lives.

🏭 Who Made The Round-Up

That monogram is the clue. Round-Up was one of the popular cigar brands of Celestino, Costello & Company of York, Pennsylvania, and two C's with & Co fit their name exactly. So this steer came out of a cigar factory in York, Pennsylvania, a long way from any cattle drive.

The man behind it was Edwin B. Myers, a York tobacco man born in 1844. In 1873, when he was 29, he talked several partners into joining him in Myers, Adams & Company, a wholesale leaf tobacco house, and Celestino, Costello & Company was set up at the same time to make the cigars. By 1899 the cigar factory was at 209 North Beaver Street, just north of the York County Academy, and Polk's city directory listed Myers and John C. Eimerbrink as the owners. When the state factory inspector came through that March he counted 114 workers, 24 men and 90 women. 84 of them were under 21, and twelve were kids between 13 and 16. It was the top cigar manufacturer in York that year, and besides Round-Up it sold a 10-cent cigar called the Little Barrister.

The Myers family had the whole trade sewn up. Edwin and his sons Walter, Frank and Thomas ran E. Myers & Company, which made cigar boxes, and Thomas started T. A. Myers & Company with his father and brothers as printers and engravers, turning out mostly cigar bands and cigar box labels. Leaf, cigars, boxes and labels, all in one York family. Up to 1919 the cigar company worked only in the city. In 1920 it started spreading into the countryside, and by 1922 it was making cigars in York, Dallastown and Pleasureville. Edwin didn't live to see that; he died in 1916.

He left a landmark behind, though. In 1901 Edwin and his wife Anna bought a farm in Springettsbury Township and named it Meadowbrook, and the mansion there still stands as Christmas Tree Hill on Whiteford Road. York tradition holds that the columns on its porch came from the cupola of the county's second courthouse, which went up in 1841 and came down in 1898.

🌾 The Home of the Five Cent Cigar

York County was cigar country. The internal revenue office in York counted twelve hundred cigar factories in the county in 1907, turning out three hundred million cigars a year and paying close to a million dollars in tax. By 1920 the county made 573 million cigars, 20 percent of every cigar made in America, and in the 1920s the York County Cigar Manufacturers Association bragged that it was "The home of the five cent cigars."

✨ Gold, Silver and a Heavy Press

Amazing Gold embossed label. The raised parts of labels like this were highlighted with 22-karat gold or bronze leaf, and this one adds silver for the torn paper. Lithographers were stamping cigar labels with precision-machined dies in 38-ton presses by 1892, which is how you get a steer's head you can feel with your fingertips.

Cigar labels show you what antique advertising is all about with the wonderful graphics that lithography and embossing provided that modern printing just can't reproduce. This was mostly a lost art after the 1920s unfortunately. Cigar Labels are a reminder of a bygone era but the amazing lithography process is unparalleled even to this day in my opinion. Museums and Art Institutes have galleries dedicated to them and more and more of them and collectors are seeking these out to preserve the history.

Imagine this amazing antique advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum!

My pictures seriously don't do it justice. These had to be done on heavy paper stock which makes them stay vibrant and new looking for a long time.

This item has reached full antique status.

🎨 The Artists

Most of these artists were very good but desperate for work during that era and got paid very little and received no recognition for their work. Unfortunately, the majority of these artists will remain unknown but we can keep their art alive forever.