Antique 1920s-50s Garden Bouquet Toilet Soap Label 🧼 Very Rare, Manhattan, NY

Who Made Garden Bouquet Toilet Soap? 🧼 Garden Bouquet Toilet Soap Wrapper, Manhattan Soap Co., Inc., New York

Size: 7" x 4 3/4" ~ Unused.

So pretty and so simple! This is an antique Garden Bouquet toilet soap wrapper from the Manhattan Soap Co., Inc. of New York, never wrapped around a bar. Garden Bouquet is written in a flowing slate-blue script, with TOILET SOAP underneath, over a little picture of a wrought-iron garden gate on a stone path with red and blue flowers spilling out on both sides. The name repeats up both side panels and upside down on the top flap, so it read right-side up from every side once it was folded around the soap, and the corners are cut for folding.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• Garden Bouquet TOILET SOAP
• Garden Bouquet (on the flap and both side panels)
• USE GARDEN BOUQUET FOR FRESH & EXQUISITE CLEANLINESS
• "GARDEN BOUQUET TOILET SOAP IS A HIGH GRADE FRENCH MILLED SOAP. MILD AND NEUTRAL FOR THE MOST SENSITIVE SKIN. LATHERS FREELY IN ALL KINDS OF WATER."
• MANHATTAN SOAP CO., INC., NEW YORK

French milled means the soap was run through steel rollers again and again before it was pressed, which made a harder, smoother, longer-lasting bar. That's why it gets top billing on the back panel.

🗽 The Manhattan Soap Company

The Manhattan Soap Company was Frank Gaius Burke's, a former North Dakota sheep man and Texas cattleman who came to New York in 1888 (the founding year shows up as 1885, 1888 or 1890 depending on the source), and it's best remembered for two soaps: Sweetheart, and this one, Garden Bouquet. The company started out at 426 West 38th Street in Manhattan, had an early plant on Stone Street, and in November 1916 bought waterfront property at the Degnon Terminal on Hunterspoint Avenue in Long Island City, Queens. By 1937 its offices were at 441 Lexington Avenue.

It had its run-ins with the regulators like everybody else. In April 1937 Manhattan Soap agreed to stop using the word "doctor" in its ads, since the government thought people might take it to mean a physician had a hand in the soap, and it promised the Federal Trade Commission it wouldn't print false prices on its soap cartons. On July 31, 1956, the Purex company bought Manhattan Soap, by then best known for Sweetheart, and kept that famous oval Sweetheart bar with the raised wreath around the edge. In 1925 the company also took over the old World War I Harriman shipyard building at Bristol, Pennsylvania, for its works. And that little "INC." on the wrapper dates it: the company signed itself plain "Manhattan Soap Co." until about 1923, so this wrapper is from the 1920s to the 1950s, when Garden Bouquet bars were still turning up in YMCA summer camp boxes.

🏡 Display

It's lovely framed in a bathroom, a powder room or a guest room, and a perfect gift for a gardener, a soap maker, or anybody from New York City.