Antique 1910s 🍁 New England Vermont Maple Sap Syrup Label NOS Boston MA

Size: 4 x 3 inches ~ New old stock, never applied. They vary a little one to the next.

100% Pure Vermont Maple, Says the Label. The Massachusetts Courts Had Questions. 🍁

Everything on this label is selling one idea: purity. A white farmhouse under a blue sky, a cow in the dooryard, a horse and buggy on the lane, a maple leaf in every corner, and across the middle, in a navy and gold banner, VERMONT MAPLE SAP SYRUP — 100% PURE. The name at the bottom is the New England Maple Syrup Company of Boston. Between 1912 and 1914 that company stood before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts twice over blended maple, and it lost both times. In 1914 the court let its conviction stand for a syrup of maple sugar mixed with granulated sugar, sold under another of its brands. This is the label from the other side of that story — the one that said pure, said Vermont, and said sap.

🔍 The Label: What It Prints

An unused paper label, 4" x 3" (about 10 x 7.6 cm), printed in navy, blue, teal, gold and orange on a cream ground inside a tan border. From top to bottom:

• New England — heavy blackletter-style lettering outlined in yellow
• A farm scene — a two-story farmhouse with a chimney and an attached ell among shade trees, a cow in the yard, a buggy drawn by one horse along the dirt lane at left, and a row of young evergreens at lower right
• VERMONT / MAPLE SAP SYRUP — inside a navy cartouche edged with gold scrollwork
• 100% PURE
• NEW ENGLAND MAPLE SYRUP CO. — set in an arch
• BOSTON MASS.

An orange maple leaf sits in each of the four corners. The back is blank, with the front lettering faintly showing through the paper. This is new old stock — never applied to a can or a bottle.

My pictures honestly don't do it justice — the colors and detail in person have that warm, early-20th-century charm that only original printing can deliver. 🍁

🏭 Uncle John's, Golden Tree and a Boston Syrup Packer

The company was a Boston syrup packer that ran a whole family of brands. By about 1915 the company ran a plant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one newspaper that year called it the largest maple syrup concern in the country. A candy box for Uncle John's Maple Kisses, marked New England Maple Syrup Co., Winter Hill, Boston, Mass., survives in the ephemera collection of Historic New England; the text on it says the candy was "Manufactured by the packers of Uncle John's Syrup." A large group of the company's advertising, catalogued at auction as 1915–1920, held chromolithographed cardboard signs for Uncle John's Golden Tree Syrup and Maple Hill Syrup, a die-cut Uncle John's Syrup store display, a black and white Uncle John's Syrup sign, twenty-one Maple Kisses posters, and sixteen Maple Kisses boxes still packed with recipe booklets.

Historic New England also holds the company's Rock Maple Brand label for 100% pure Vermont maple sap syrup, and four labels of this same New England design, each 3 x 2 1/4 inches, catalogued undated and purchased for its ephemera collection in 2000. So the firm sold an uncle's name, a golden tree, a maple hill and a candy — and, on this label, the plainest promise in its whole lineup.

⚖️ Twice Before the Supreme Judicial Court

1912 — the blended sugar. In Adams v. New England Maple Syrup Company, a pair of sugar makers sued the company for $358.52, the price of a shipment of "blended maple sugar," part maple and part granulated, that the company had ordered. The company's defense was that the sale broke the Massachusetts food adulteration law, because the boxes were not labelled as a mixture with the percentage of each ingredient. The record showed the boxes went out unmarked at the company's own request, and that the company resold part of the sugar to other buyers. On January 3, 1912, the court ruled for the sugar makers. Justice Hammond compared blended sugar to a mince pie — a mixture bought and sold as a well-known article of its own, not an adulteration of either ingredient. The company had to pay.

1914 — Golden Tree syrup. On December 18, 1911, a customer ordered three cases of the company's "Golden Tree" syrup. It was made by mixing maple sugar with water and adding granulated sugar. It had the same thickness as pure maple syrup and the color of one of its grades, and it sold for about half the price. The bottle labels pictured a maple tree and sugar cane and said the syrup was "made from granulated and maple sugars." A complaint was sworn out in the Police Court of Lowell on January 2, 1912. On May 19, 1914, the Supreme Judicial Court decided that Golden Tree was not an imitation — the buyer ordered Golden Tree and received Golden Tree — but that a 1910 amendment to the state food law did not permit cane sugar as a preservative in maple syrup, maple sugar, honey or cocoa. The syrup counted as adulterated, it could be sold only in the manner the law prescribed, and the conviction stood.

Set this label beside those two cases and its wording reads differently. No sugar cane in the picture. No "made from" list. Just VERMONT, MAPLE SAP SYRUP and 100% PURE, front and center.

🍁 Why "Pure" Became the Word That Sold Maple

Maple had been fighting cheap cane sugar for years. Changes in the tariff laws in the years before 1890 pushed cane sugar prices down, and efforts to keep maple prices on an equal footing failed. The McKinley Tariff of 1890 put sugar on the free list and paid American producers a federal bounty of two cents a pound — a bounty that extended to sugar made from maple sap produced in the United States. It was not enough to hold the old market. New England's sugarmakers changed products instead: by the turn of the twentieth century syrup had become the main maple product, and Vermont made 160,000 gallons of it in 1900.

Syrup brought a new temptation, because it was easy to stretch. The federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 prohibited adding glucose to maple syrup, which bolstered the whole industry, and Massachusetts added its own 1910 amendment against cane sugar in maple syrup — the one the Golden Tree case turned on. By 1920 Vermont was producing three and a half million gallons of syrup, by then a popular table delicacy. A label printing VERMONT and 100% PURE was making the exact claim the law had just started to police.

🏙️ Boston and Winter Hill

The label says Boston, Mass. The company's candy box adds the neighborhood: Winter Hill. Winter Hill lies in Somerville, next door to Boston, and takes its name from a 120-foot hill. During the Revolution it carried American fortifications; Henry Pelham's 1777 map of the military works around Boston shows the Winter Hill Fort, described as an extensive installation, though little of it remains. In the industrial years that followed, the hill became home to working families — and to a syrup packer that sold Vermont farm country to city kitchens.

🌳 The Legends Behind the Word "Sap"

Long before any Boston packer, maple sugaring belonged to the Eastern Woodland peoples, and their legends tell how it began. One Iroquois legend tells of Chief Woksis, who threw his tomahawk into a maple tree on a late winter evening. The next morning turned sunny and warm, sap ran from the cut into a container at the foot of the tree, and when his wife's cooking pot ran low on water she filled it with the sap. The meat cooked, and the sap boiled down into syrup.

A legend told among the Abenaki and Mi'kmaq explains why the work is so hard. The Creator first made life too easy, filling the maple trees with a thick syrup that flowed all year. Glooskap found a village gone silent, the cooking fires dead and the gardens overgrown, and the people lying in the woods letting syrup drip into their mouths. He carried water from the lake, filled the trees until the syrup ran thin and fast, and told the people the maples would give them only a watery sap from then on. It still takes about forty gallons of sap to boil down one gallon of syrup. That thin, hard-won sap is the word printed in the middle of this label.