Antique 1920s Squaw Brand Petit Pois Extra Small Peas Can Label Pair ✨ Centerville Canning Co, Maryland

Who Packed Squaw Brand Petit Pois? 🫛 Petit Pois Extra Small Peas Can Label, Centerville Canning Co., Maryland

Size: 11" x 4 1/4" each ~ Unused. ~ Little to no wear.

This one's a pair - two of these Centerville petit pois labels come to you together.

This antique can label is a beauty, lithographed in rich color with gleaming gold accents. At the left a Native American mother in braids, beaded necklaces and a red blanket carries her baby on her back and holds a long spear, with feathers, arrowheads and beadwork scattered around her, and at the right a big gold-bordered oval shows a spray of fat green pea pods and leaves over EXTRA SMALL PEAS and PETIT POIS.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

The back is blank, with the design showing through faintly.

🖨️ Simpson & Doeller of Baltimore

The printer's line belongs to The Simpson & Doeller Company of Baltimore, a prominent Baltimore can-label lithographer. The company ran its label works from the 1880s through 1954, in the big red brick building it bought in October 1908 on East Preston Street, and The Henry Ford museum keeps one of its tomato labels, Defender Brand, from 1913 to 1918.

🫛 The Langralls and the Centreville Peas

The brand on this label belonged to J. Langrall & Bro. of Baltimore, fruit and vegetable canners since 1878. A 1906 national register of canned goods brands lists Squaw under Langrall's name, the only Squaw in the book, right alongside their Maryland Chief. "Centerville, Md." is Centreville, the county seat of Queen Anne's County on the Eastern Shore, and the trade papers spelled it both ways. In 1899 the Langralls announced a cannery there that could put up 50,000 or 60,000 cans a day, and in June 1912 the pea canning machinery at their Centreville packing house started up for the first time, with the factory paying the farmers $45 a ton for peas. The Centerville Canning Co. named on this label was very likely that Centreville operation. Langrall still had the plant in Centreville in 1939.

📜 A Brand Name From Another Time

The brand name on this label is a word that was once used casually in American advertising and is now understood as a slur against Native American women. On November 19, 2021, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland ordered it removed from federal use, and on September 8, 2022, after consulting more than 70 tribes, the government finished renaming about 650 valleys, streams and other places that had carried it. A label like this one is a piece of that history, and it's worth keeping and understanding for exactly that reason.

🖼️ Display

Every label sold is one fewer left for sale anywhere. Nobody is printing more, and once these are on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.

It's a fine piece of Baltimore lithography for a collection of Maryland canning history or antique advertising.