Antique Black Maria Tin Tobacco Tag 🏷️ 1920s–1930s Taylor Bros Winston NC Collectible

Size: 1 x 0.33 inches ~ They vary a little one to the next.

🏷️ What The Tag Shows

A small rectangle of lithographed tin, rounded corners, printed on a yellow ground. A figure stands facing left in a tall plumed headdress, one arm outstretched, the other holding a red club-shaped object, with a red wing-shaped device above and the words BLACK MARIA lettered in red beside it. Nothing on the front is printed with a maker, a town, a date, or a number. The back is bare metal, with a small folded prong meant to be pushed straight through a plug of chewing tobacco and crimped flat on the other side — the whole point of the thing.

🏭 Taylor Brothers, Winston-Salem

The tag doesn't name its maker, but a sibling die does: an embossed oval version of this same brand reads TAYLOR BROS / BLACK MARIA / WINSTON N.C. Taylor Brothers was founded in 1883 by William B. Taylor, making plug, twist, and loose-leaf chewing tobacco under brands that included Bull of the Woods and Cannon Ball. The company sold to American Snuff Company in 1952, and the Winston-Salem plant it built is still running tobacco today. Local legend has it that the Taylor brothers took a fierce pride in their plug, and that a hand caught cutting corners in the pressing or the tagging was let go on the spot.

Winston itself started as a land sale in 1849 for the new seat of Forsyth County, and took its name in 1851 from Joseph Winston, a Revolutionary War officer. By 1878 the town already had twenty-one tobacco businesses employing more than a thousand people — Hamilton Scales' plug works on Liberty Street, P. H. Hanes & Co., and R. J. Reynolds' first factory all opened within a few years of each other. Winston merged with its neighbor Salem in 1913 to become Winston-Salem.

📌 What The Tag Was For

A crimped tin tag was hard to fake. Once it was pushed through a plug and folded flat, a storekeeper couldn't quietly swap in a cheaper leaf and pass it off as the branded product — the tag would show the tampering. More than twelve thousand plug tobacco brands were registered between 1870 and the 1920s, and a great many of them wore a little tin tag like this. Manufacturers also turned the tags into their own reward system: customers saved them for cash or premiums running from candy to pocketknives to grandfather clocks, and a collectors' club with its own mail newsletter existed as early as 1886. Collectors who work the Winston-Salem antique circuit will tell you Taylor Brothers tags turn up most often in estate sales around Forsyth County and the Piedmont.

📅 How Old It Is

The Smithsonian holds this same tag design and dates it to about 1929. Taylor Brothers wasn't in business before 1883, so nothing earlier is possible, and these tags belong to the 1920s and 1930s. On its own, this design is a hard one to find.

🚓 Why "Black Maria"

"Black Maria" was American slang for the police wagon that hauled prisoners off to jail, in print as early as 1835. Where the name itself came from is still an open question. One version says it honors Maria Lee, a formidable Boston boarding-house keeper of the 1820s the police used to call on when they needed help with a rowdy guest. The other points to a racehorse named Black Maria, foaled in Harlem in 1826, who won a brutal twenty-mile race in October 1832. Word historians lean toward the racehorse, but nobody has ever settled it.