Antique 1910s J B Lynas Tea Label 🍵 Logansport IN Advertising

What Tea Did J.B. Lynas Sell? 🍵 Antique 1910s Tea Label, Logansport IN

Size: 7 1/2" x 4" ~ little to slight wear. Never would notice on display, but please see pictures and judge for yourself.

🍵 What This Sheet Shows

Two panels on one cream sheet. The left lists a "Partial List of J. B. L. Products" — a real catalog snapshot: flavoring extracts (lemon, banana, Jamaica ginger, cinnamon, orange, peppermint, strawberry, vanilla, even a "Maple-O"), dyes, spices, a full line of toilet articles and soaps, eleven named perfumes, and a run of household remedies down to Blood Tonic and White Mountain Liniment. The foot line reads "DR. J. B. LYNAS & SON, — Logansport, Ind.".

The right panel is the tea label itself: a bamboo-look frame around an oval vignette of a tea porter in white, conical hat, carrying two blue chests stamped JBL on a shoulder pole, in front of a red wall with faux-Chinese lettering panels, clouds and a setting sun, two cranes at his feet, "TEA" across the bottom in shaded block letters. The box at the top of the frame, where a variety name would normally go, is left blank on this sheet — other printings of the same design fill it in with OOLONG or IMPERIAL and add a third panel of tea-buying copy. This is the plain stock version, ready for whichever variety went in the box.

👨‍⚕️ Dr. J. B. Lynas

James B. Lynas was born in Dearborn County, Indiana, on February 14, 1835, and came up through the Eclectic Medical School in Indianapolis, earning his diploma in 1874. He had already begun mixing family remedies for his patients by the mid-1860s, and the demand outgrew a back room fast enough that he built a real laboratory to keep up with it. The way Logansport tells it, by 1900 some six thousand people were out selling his goods, and the firm kept offices in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco, and across the water in London, Paris and Tokyo. He married Sarah E. Reed in 1862; she outlived him, dying in 1911. He himself died on January 28, 1901.

🏢 Dr. J. B. Lynas & Son

His son George incorporated the firm in 1904 as "Dr. J. B. Lynas & Son" with $100,000 in capital — George president, Sarah Lynas vice-president and treasurer — and in 1906 bought property on Market Street, where that December they let the contract for a new four-story block; the Lynas building there still carries the letters "J B L" at the top today. By 1913 the company had between fourteen and fifteen hundred agents working nearly every state, adding roughly sixty more a month, selling not just the original J. B. L. medicines but spices, teas, sachet powders, toilet articles and perfumes off the same list this sheet prints. The whole operation ran on those agents and a replace-it-if-you're-not-satisfied guarantee — the firm's own line was that its trademark was "a guarantee of absolute purity." When they needed more salesmen, they went to the papers, and I love the little want ad they ran in the Syracuse Journal, up in Kosciusko County, Indiana, in January 1912: big money "as a country salesman right in your own county," and "You only need a horse and rig to start." That was the J. B. L. agent: a horse, a rig, and a line of goods like the one on this sheet, working the country roads. They ran the odd product ad too. A 1911 one in the Richmond Palladium pitched a foot remedy of theirs and name-checked Dr. Lynas' Ready Relief, the same Ready Relief you'll find in the remedies column here.

🫖 A Building Full of Labels

George ran the company from 1901 until his death in 1926, alongside a bread business of his own called Kiddie Knead. His brother Will sold the family firm in 1938; it was dissolved in 1965. This label turned up in a stash found on the top floor of the Market Street building — the same floor where George ran an apron factory, seamstresses at work above the shop. The letters J B L are still up there today.