Antique 1920s "Wisckey" Whiskey Flavor Label 🐍 NOS Prohibition Era Chemical Industrial Co. Providence RI

Size: 2 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches ~ They vary a little one to the next.

🐍 What's Printed On It

Every word here is printed right on the label: IMITATION in red, FLAVOR in black, on a yellow banner up top; WISCKEY - yes, that's the spelling, no H - in white letters outlined in black across a metallic gold banner; FOR NON-ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES arched underneath; ARTIFICIAL COLOR; then CHEMICAL INDUSTRIAL CO. in red, R. DE ANGELIS. REG. PHARMACIST in black, and PROVIDENCE R.I. in red. Down in the corner, tiny, outside the design itself: (PRINTED IN ITALY). No street number, no date, no bottle size anywhere on it.

🎨 Green and Gold, Not Cream

This isn't the pale, cream-toned label you might picture for something this old - the front is a rich green ground with a metallic gold banner, two coiled green serpents at the top corners and two more rising up the sides, four orange frilled blossoms, a small green cup-and-cross ornament at the center, and a green serpent-head ornament at the bottom. Cream only shows up on the reverse, which is blank aside from a faint show-through of the front design. It's 2 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches - small, closer to a stamp than a playing card - and this stack never made it onto a bottle.

🥃 What It Was Actually For

A sibling label from the same company, for a plain "Whiskey" extract, spells out the whole business in Italian: Preparato In Famiglia Con I Puri Estratti - prepared at home with the pure extracts. That's what Chemical Industrial Co. sold: flavoring extracts for Italian-American families to make their own liquors at home, plus the labels to put on the finished bottle. This Wisckey label is the extract's own label - the thing that went on the bottle of flavoring itself.

🏛️ Raffaele De Angelis, Providence

R. De Angelis was a real person with a documented career in Providence - Raffaele De Angelis, born in Italy in 1878. He was already running a variety store on Union Ave. by 1899, and dealing in liquors at that same address by 1901-02. By 1903 he had an "Industrial Chemical Co." going on Cranston Street, and he trained as a pharmacist, making his name manufacturing citrate of magnesia - an existing digestive remedy, not his invention, but he did well enough with it to put up his own building at 131 Knight Street, right on Federal Hill, Providence's Little Italy. Southern Italian immigrants had been settling the Hill since the 1870s, and by the time De Angelis built there it was the heart of the city's Italian community - his customers were his neighbors. A 1912 factory inspection found him in good shape with six employees; by 1916 he was a registered pharmacist, the title printed on this label. By 1921 he'd grown to thirty employees. He kept the Knight Street operation going for decades - still there in the early 1930s - and by 1953 it had been renamed the Thymoform Co.

⚖️ Prohibition's Careful Wording

The label calls itself an imitation flavor with artificial color, for non-alcoholic beverages - exactly the kind of careful, lawyerly phrasing a pharmacist would reach for once the country went dry. The 18th Amendment took effect in January 1920 and stood until December 1933, and Rhode Island - along with Connecticut - was one of only two states that never ratified it in the first place. That wording fits the dry years about as well as anything could.

📦 How This Turned Up

The story goes that years after the old pharmacy building was sold, thousands of these colorful labels turned up inside it, and loose ones from that find have been trickling out ever since. So there are a few of these around, but not many, and every one of them is a little piece of Federal Hill.

🥂 A Local Legend

Local legend has it that a few Providence-area pharmacies running flavoring operations like this kept the business going well past Repeal in 1933, because their customers never stopped buying and saw no reason to switch suppliers once Prohibition ended. De Angelis's own operation was still running on Knight Street in the early 1930s, and by 1953 it had become the Thymoform Co.