Antique 1920s-30s Buyers Special Mince Meat Label 🍎 LARGE VERSION, Edgar Brick & Sons Crosswicks NJ, NOS

Who Bought Mince Meat by the 50-Pound Tub? 🥧 Antique 1920s-30s Buyers Special Mince Meat Label, Edgar Brick & Sons, Crosswicks, N.J.

Size: 8 1/4" x 4 1/4"

Fifty pounds of mince meat - that's a lot of pie! This is the big tub label: BUYERS SPECIAL over MINCE MEAT in heavy black letters, then "Prepared from Apples, Dextrose, Raisins, Starch, Vinegar, Beef, Candied Peel, Spices, and Sherry Flavor and 1/10 of 1% Benzoate of Soda," NET WEIGHT: 50 LBS., and MANUFACTURED BY EDGAR BRICK & SONS, CROSSWICKS, N.J., all inside a checkered border on cream paper. Never pasted on a tub. I figure a 50-pound tub went to a grocer or a bakery, not somebody's kitchen.

🏪 From a General Store to the Biggest in the Country

Edgar Brick and his wife Susan came to Crosswicks in the 1850s and opened a general store on Main Street. In 1874 Edgar got fed up with the mince meat he was buying from Philadelphia and started making his own - he sold 76 pounds the first year. Five years later he needed more room, so in 1879 he moved two farmhouses onto the lot and joined them together into a factory. By 1900 Edgar Brick & Sons was the biggest mince meat maker in New Jersey.

Edgar died in 1920 and his sons Arthur, Josiah and Charles took it over. By World War II they had 40 people turning out three million pounds of mince meat a year - the largest mince meat maker in the United States. Then, in 1968, they quit mince meat altogether and started making alcoholic beverages, and the company closed in 1979. The Hamilton Uniform Company bought the old farmhouse factory in 1980, but it's been empty for years now and it's on Preservation New Jersey's endangered list with its roof falling in.

The Bricks helped bring electricity to Crosswicks, too, and built a mill and an ice plant on Crosswicks Creek.

Old-timers say the whole village used to smell like simmering mince meat every fall, and the story goes that Chesterfield Township's Heritage Day still serves mince meat made from Edgar's 1874 recipe.

📅 Dating It by the Recipe

The ingredient line dates this one. Crystalline dextrose wasn't patented until 1923, and it was 1930 before the government let packers use corn sugar without special labeling - so a label proudly listing Dextrose belongs to the 1920s or '30s. And notice it says "Sherry Flavor," not sherry.

💣 Crosswicks

Crosswicks is an old Quaker village in Chesterfield Township - Quakers settled along Crosswicks Creek in 1677, and in 1775 Chesterfield's Quakers sent the New Jersey legislature its first petition to abolish slavery. And here's my favorite thing about it: on June 23, 1778, five days before the Battle of Monmouth, a cannonball hit the brick Friends Meeting House during a skirmish at Crosswicks Creek. Nobody knows which side fired it. They mortared it right into the wall, and it's still up there on the second floor.

A great one for a kitchen wall, a bakery, or a New Jersey history collection. You'll get one like the one shown.

📷 About the Last Two Photos

Those are just for history - you get the label, not them! They're the Brick family's own things, kept today by the Chesterfield Township Historical Society in Crosswicks: the chopping block the family says Edgar made his very first mince meat on, and the green spice bucket they measured spices with. The society says the bucket still smells of spices.