Antique 1910s Fresh Oregon Hops Drug Store Label 🌿 – Matthieu Drug Co., Portland

Hops at the Drug Store? 🌿 Antique 1910s Fresh Oregon Hops Label, Matthieu Drug Co., Portland

Size: 2 1/2" x 1 1/4" ~ Little to no wear.

🌿 Picture a corner drugstore in old Albina, on Portland's east side, with a bin of loose hops behind the counter. When you bought some, the clerk scooped them into a packet and stuck on one of these: FRESH OREGON HOPS up top, with a blank space for the weight or price, and the Matthieu Drug Co. name, its MDC monogram, Telephone EAST 0662 and 275 Russell Street, Portland, Oregon down below. Mine are New Old Stock, never stuck on anything, with little to no wear.

💤 Hops From the Drugstore

Hops weren't only for brewers. They have a long history as a medicinal plant, and the drugstore sold them for calming remedies, stomach preparations and sleep aids, as well as to folks brewing at home. A pharmacy had plenty of labels for the back counter, poisons among them. This one was meant for the everyday customer, and it had one job: tell you these were fresh, and they were from right here in Oregon.

🌲 When Oregon Was Hop Country

That word Oregon on the label carried some real pride. Oregon's first commercial hop yard went in at Buena Vista, in the mid-Willamette Valley, in 1867, planted by a grower named Wells. By 1895 Oregon was growing more hops than any state but New York, and from 1922 to 1943 it was the biggest hop producer in the whole country. By the 1930s the country around Independence, in Polk County, was calling itself the Hop Center of the World. So a Portland druggist selling Fresh Oregon Hops was selling the state's own crop, at a time when the state led the nation in it.

🏪 Russell Street and Williams Avenue

The store sat on the corner of Williams Avenue and Russell Street. Both streets go back to the founding of Albina, platted in 1872 by Edwin Russell, William Page and George H. Williams, who each got a street named for him. Albina was its own town until July 6, 1891, when it was consolidated with Portland and East Portland into one city. An Oregon Journal photograph that the Oregon Historical Society dates to about 1927 shows Matthieu Drug Co. right in the foreground, with a streetcar and automobiles out on Williams, a J. C. Penney sign down the block and Groves Hardware across the street.

📬 The Address Dates It

Look at the address: just 275 Russell Street, no North or Northeast in front of it. That's old Portland. The city's numbering had grown up with no real system as it swallowed its neighbors, and by the late 1920s the postmaster said about 2,000 pieces of mail a day were going astray. So in 1931 City Engineer Olaf Laurgaard's plan renumbered the whole city into the quadrants Portland still uses, a job that ran into 1933. An address like this one comes from before the Great Renumbering, and the old named telephone exchange, EAST, fits right along with it.

I love little everyday things like this. Nobody gave it a second thought back then, and now it's a window into a Portland corner drugstore.

The supply is finite - once these last Matthieu Drug Co. hops labels are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.