Antique 1910s Frankle Brothers Cigar Co. Draft-Advice, Youngstown Ohio 🥃 NOS Tobacco Letterhead

Size: 9 1/2" x 6" ~ Unused, crisp printing; a touch more edge wear on some than others. They vary a little one to the next.

🧾 What It Is

This is the blank draft-advice notice The Frankle Brothers Co. of Youngstown, Ohio sent to tell a customer a draft had been drawn against their account: "We have this day drawn on you for ___ invoice ___," never filled in. The date line reads "Youngstown, O. ___ 191__," with the last digit left blank, so these were printed for the 1910s. It's a handsome frame-size sheet, and it's unused.

🏢 The Building on the Corner

Across the top is the Frankle Brothers building itself: four stories of brick on the corner of West Federal and Phelps Streets in downtown Youngstown, with storefront signs reading "Frankle Brothers, Wholesale, Cigar & Tobacconists," and wagons, a streetcar and people going by out front. That corner had been Charles B. Weaver's shoe store since 1872 before the Frankles moved in. The sheet also prints "Established 1884," "Manufacturers and Jobbers of Cigars," "Successors to Frankle Brothers," M. Frankle as President, A. M. Frankle as Vice President & Secretary, and telephone 516.

🚬 Two Brothers and a Cigar Business

A. M. Frankle was Almon Max Frankle, born in Austria-Hungary on April 1, 1867. He came to America in 1880 at 14 with his sister and worked as a pack peddler, then learned cigar making in Herman Rice's shop on East Boardman Street and at Holstein & Goldberg's factory in Cleveland. In 1884 he went into the cigar business on his own at Boardman and Watt Streets, making and selling cigars, and a year later he took his brother Mose into partnership as Frankle Brothers. Mose is the "M. Frankle, Pres." on this sheet. They bought out the business of Jenkins Powell Jones on East Federal Street, and in 1892 they moved to the corner of Phelps and Federal, the building you see here, selling wholesale and retail across a hundred miles around Youngstown. The National Cigar History Museum remembers it as a "3 man cigar factory" to start, with brands like REVELATION and ABBEY, and a 1913 photo shows a Frankle delivery truck painted for their MOMAX cigar.

Almon married Rebecca Goodman of Cleveland in 1892. He was a 32nd-degree Mason, an Odd Fellow, a Knight of Pythias and an Elk, and a member of the Children of Israel congregation, and Mrs. Frankle helped organize Youngstown's Federation of Jewish Charities in 1907. All of this played out in a steel town that was booming in those years.

Old Youngstown hands say the Frankles made a fortune in cigars, downsized to a smaller store in the Depression, and that the Shagrin Brothers bought the store in the 1950s before Anchor Cigar bought them out in the '60s.