Antique Banquet Hall Mince Meat Label 🦁 LARGE VERSION, Edgar Brick & Sons Crosswicks NJ, NOS 1910s

Real Brandy and Real Beef 🥧 Antique 1910s Banquet Hall Mince Meat Label, Edgar Brick & Sons, Crosswicks, N.J. - Large Version

Size: 8 1/4" x 5 1/2"

Now that's a recipe: "Combines Apples, Sugar, Raisins, Currants, Candied Peels, Beef, Spices, Salt, Brandy and 1/10 of 1% Benzoate of Soda." BANQUET HALL MINCE MEAT runs across the top in tall black letters, NET WEIGHT 30 LBS. sits in a little box, and Manufactured by EDGAR BRICK & SONS, CROSSWICKS, N.J. fills the bottom, all inside a checkered border on cream paper. It's the big 30-pound tub size, and it was never used.

🥃 Why I Call It 1910s

Three things on the label tell you. The benzoate line follows the 1909 rule that let packers use 1/10 of 1% benzoate of soda if they said so on the container. The net weight follows the 1913 law that made packers print it. So it's 1914 or later. And the brandy is just listed, plain as day, with nothing about Prohibition anywhere on it - that's why I put it before 1920, in the 1910s.

🏪 Brick's of Crosswicks

Edgar Brick and his wife Susan ran the general store on Main Street in Crosswicks, and in 1874 Edgar decided the mince meat he was buying from Philadelphia wasn't good enough and made his own. Seventy-six pounds the first year! In 1879 he moved two farmhouses onto the lot and joined them into a factory, and by 1900 Edgar Brick & Sons was the biggest mince meat maker in New Jersey. His sons Arthur, Josiah and Charles took over when he died in 1920, and by World War II they were the biggest in the whole country - three million pounds a year with 40 workers. Banquet Hall was one of their brands, along with Nonpareil, Old Homestead and Beechwood.

The story in Crosswicks is that you could smell the mince meat cooking all over the village every fall. Brick's quit mince meat in 1968, made alcoholic beverages for a while, and closed in 1979. The Hamilton Uniform Company bought the old farmhouse factory in 1980; it's been empty for years now, and Preservation New Jersey has it on its endangered list.

The Bricks did a lot more for the village than make pie filling - they helped bring electricity to Crosswicks, built a mill and an ice plant on Crosswicks Creek, and helped start the Chesterfield Township Historical Society. The story goes that Edgar's sons paid for the village firehouse in his memory.

💣 The Village

Crosswicks is a Quaker village going back to 1677, and there's a cannonball from a June 23, 1778 skirmish still mortared into the wall of its brick Friends Meeting House - nobody knows which side fired it.

Great framed in a kitchen, a bakery or a dining room. You'll get one like the one shown.

📷 About the Last Two Photos

Those are just for history - you get the label, not them! They're the Brick family's own things, kept today by the Chesterfield Township Historical Society in Crosswicks: the chopping block the family says Edgar made his very first mince meat on, and the green spice bucket they measured spices with. The society says the bucket still smells of spices.