Antique 1920s Squaw Brand Cut Green Stringless Beans Can Label Pair ✨ Centerville Canning Co, Centerville Maryland

Who Packed Squaw Brand Beans? 🫛 Squaw Brand Cut Green Stringless Beans Can Label, Centerville Canning Co., Maryland

Size: 11" x 4 1/4" each ~ Never used. ~ Little to no wear.

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

This is a wraparound can label for a one-pound can of green beans, and the printing is gorgeous. On the left side a Native American woman with long dark braids stands in a red blanket with a baby on her back, holding a tall staff, with strings of beads around her neck, framed by feathers, beadwork borders and little cross and arrow designs. Beside her, the brand name SQUAW BRAND sits in a big gold roundel, with DISTRIBUTED BY CENTERVILLE CANNING CO., CENTERVILLE, MD. below. The other panel shows a big red bowl heaped with bright green cut beans, CONTENTS 1 LB., and CUT GREEN STRINGLESS BEANS across a dark banner. At the foot, in tiny type, is the printer's line, SIMPSON & DOELLER CO. BALTO. MD. The back is blank, with the printing showing through in reverse.

🪶 About the Name

We list this label under the brand name it was printed with, because that's what it is, but it's worth saying plainly: the word is an ethnic and sexual slur that was used for Native American women for hundreds of years, and today it's considered derogatory and racist. It turned up on postcards, products and place names across the country. In November 2021 the U.S. Department of the Interior, under Secretary Deb Haaland, declared it a derogatory term and began removing it from federal use, and on September 8, 2022 it officially replaced every federal place name that contained it. Labels like this one are part of the record of how American advertising pictured Native people, and that's a history worth keeping and understanding.

⚖️ Centerville, Queen Anne's County

Centerville, spelled Centreville today, is the county seat of Queen Anne's County on Maryland's Eastern Shore. In 1782 the Maryland General Assembly moved the county courthouse from Queenstown to a more central spot, which is where the name came from. It took a decade to get the land, a plantation called Chesterfield at the head of the Corsica River, and the town was incorporated in 1794. On June 1, 1796 the court declared the new building "the proper Court House of Queen Anne's County." The Centerville Canning Co. distributed its beans from there.

🖨️ Simpson & Doeller of Baltimore

The Simpson & Doeller Co. was a Baltimore label house serving the canning trade. It was already advertising in The Canning Trade by 1917, and in the 1930s the firm was advertising "Artistic Labels, Plain, Varnished, Embossed" in The Canning Trade. In 1954 the trade paper called it "one of the oldest label houses in the country serving the Canning Industry," when the United States Printing & Lithograph Company bought it and made it the Simpson & Doeller Division.

It's a striking piece of 1920s food advertising for a collector of can labels, Maryland history or the history of Native American imagery in advertising.