Antique 1910s-1920s Defy The World Tomatoes Can Label 🍅 Kelty & Son, Quinton NJ

Defy the World? 🍅 Antique 1910s-1920s Tomato Can Label, Kelty & Son, Quinton NJ

Size: 4 5/8" x 14 1/8" ~ Unused. ~ little to no wear.

This is an original, unused "Defy The World" Brand tomato can label, packed by Sam'l L. Kelty & Son of Quinton, Salem County, New Jersey, a long wrap-around sheet made for a tin can, not a wooden crate. One half is a big ripe tomato with "Cold Packed" written across it; the other is a farmhouse with a wrap-around porch under an evening sky, and whoever drew it gave that farmhouse real attention.

🍅 Every Word On The Label

Here's every word on it: DEFY THE WORLD / BRAND / CHOICE / Cold Packed / Tomatoes / FIRST QUALITY / CONTENTS 2 LBS. 1 OZ / Packed By / SAM'L L. KELTY & SON, / OFFICE: QUINTON, SALEM CO., N.J. No printer's name shows anywhere on it.

🕰️ Dating This Label

This can wrap dates to about the 1910s-1920s, and the label itself is most of the evidence. CONTENTS 2 LBS. 1 OZ is a net-weight declaration, and that kind of statement on packaged food only became a federal requirement under the Gould Amendment of 1913 to the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act (penalties enforced from about September 1914) -- a label printed in the 1890s would have had no legal reason to carry one. The packer's name is the second clue: Kelty's 1910 paste label read "Packed by Sam'l L. Kelty" with no "& Son" at all, so the "& SON" printed here puts this sheet after the firm brought a son into the name. And the can itself is the third: the proportions fit a No. 3 can, the same three-pound tins listed in the 1896 sheriff's sale of the old Kelty & Ayres works.

🏭 Sam'l L. Kelty & Son, Quinton's Tomato Man

Samuel Lewis Kelty, born in 1843, was canning on Beasley Neck Road at Quinton by 1884, and by 1885 he'd already put up 80,000 cans in a season, 35,000 more than the year before. In 1888, trading as Kelty & Ayars (the name also shows up spelled Ayres a few years later), the partners named their brand "Pride of the Farm" and was finishing a new main building, aiming to pack 400,000 to 500,000 cans. It wasn't all smooth: in 1896 the sheriff sold off Kelty & Ayres' factory fixtures for $2,115, in a season when canned tomatoes were fetching about a cent a can.

Kelty rebuilt. The Salem County Cultural & Heritage Commission counts his Beasley Neck Road farm and cannery among the most successful in South Jersey in the last decade of the 1800s; by its account the picking was done by a crew of twenty-five women, and he backed the boast in his brand name by claiming the best stewing tomatoes in the trade. A wonderful 1897 letter survives from twelve seasonal workers at what they called "Camp Kelty," writing home from "Klondike Cottage" that the factory work "seems only pastime" and that "Mr. Kelty, our employer, is kindness itself" -- they had grapes, apples and pears to eat freely and went to church in Quinton on Sundays. In 1904 he bought the bankrupt Claysville cannery from Alfred Bilderback for $5,000; Bilderback himself had "mysteriously disappeared before Christmas." By 1909 Kelty employed 75 people, and by 1910 "Defy the World" tomato paste, in 5-lb cans marked for the Italian trade, was going out under his name -- a Quinton neighbor, Pietro Roncoroni & Co., ran a paste factory of its own the same years.

The 1920s were Kelty at full stretch: he sat alongside Heinz, Curtice and Fogg & Hires as Salem County's "canhouse" representative in 1921; in 1922 a carload of empty cans arrived and both Quinton factories ran day and night, though that season he finished short-handed on women workers; in 1923 five carloads of canned goods left Quinton in a single week, two of them his. That same year, at 79, he climbed the scaffold himself while his smokestack was being raised from 50 feet to about 76 -- was overcome by the heat, and was back at his business the next day. He died in 1926 and is buried in East View Cemetery in Salem. In 1928 his executors sold the whole plant at public sale -- 4.65 acres, a rail siding, the peeling and canning buildings, a warehouse, boilers, and the right to keep using the "Defy the World" name. His granddaughter, Jane H. Kelty, became a teacher and later helped Mary Sim with her 1951 history of commercial canning in New Jersey.

🏘️ Quinton, Salem County

Quinton takes its name from Tobias Quinton, a settler in the old Fenwick's Colony who died in 1705; the township itself was carved out of Upper Alloways Creek in February 1873. The British fought the Battle of Quinton's Bridge here on March 18, 1778. Long before Kelty's cannery, the Quinton Glass Works was turning out glass from 1863, founded by D. P. Smith with George and Charles Hires and John Lambert -- the works supplied glass for Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial buildings. The Alloway & Quinton Railroad, opened in December 1891, was still serving a Quinton cannery as late as 1941. Salem County as a whole was the heart of the Jersey tomato -- the same coastal-plain soil that fed Kelty's kettles also fed a Heinz plant that ran in Salem from 1905 to 1977.

📦 Why These Stayed Flat

A can label like this only ever had two fates at the cannery: pasted onto a filled can and shipped off to a grocer's shelf, or held back as surplus and left flat in a warehouse box. The first kind went into the trash with the empty can. These are the second kind.

🍅 Cold Packed, First Quality

"Cold Packed" is a real period term, not decoration -- it means the tomatoes went into the can raw and were sterilized after the can was sealed, rather than being cooked first and hot-filled. It's the method the USDA was promoting in its canning bulletins of 1917 and 1918, and Kelty's label put it right on the can.