Antique NOS Wissahickon Tomato Pulp Can Label 🍅 H.G. Longaker Co Federalsburg MD, Native American Chief Litho Advertising

What Was Tomato Pulp? 🍅 An Antique Wissahickon Brand Tomato Pulp Can Label, H.G. Longaker Co., Federalsburg, Maryland

Size: 9" x 3 1/2"

An unused can label, lithographed in color on a cream ground with red borders. On the left, Wissahickon Brand over a big red diamond reading TOMATO PULP, then CONTENTS 10 OUNCES and MADE FROM TOMATOES and TOMATO TRIMMINGS. On the right, a whole little woods scene: a chief in a feathered war bonnet kneels behind a fallen log with his rifle, a setter pointing beside him, WISSAHICKON BRAND TOMATO PULP lettered on a tree trunk and Packed by H.G. LONGAKER Co. FEDERALSBURG MD. lettered along the log, as if the forest itself were doing the selling.

🍅 What's tomato pulp?

The label is honest about it: tomatoes and tomato trimmings. When the canneries packed whole tomatoes, the trim, the culls and the pieces too ragged to go in a can whole didn't get thrown out - they were cooked down into pulp, and a 1919 manual on making tomato products treats trimming pulp as its own product. A 10-ounce can was for the kitchen pot, soup and sauce. The plain CONTENTS 10 OUNCES line is the kind of net-contents statement the 1913 Gould Amendment made every packaged food carry, and dealers date this label to the 1920s.

🌾 Canning season on the Eastern Shore

Federalsburg sits on Marshyhope Creek in Caroline County, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and from about 1880 into the 1950s tomato canning was the biggest industry on the whole Delmarva Peninsula, with the 1920s its peak. Old-timers on the Shore still talk about canning season the way other regions talk about harvest festivals: when the tomatoes came ripe, whole towns turned their attention to the cannery, farmers hauled wagonloads in from the fields on contract, and the smell of stewing tomatoes hung over Main Street for weeks at a stretch. Small packers like H.G. Longaker Co. packed under their own brand names for the grocers, which is why a name like Wissahickon was once perfectly familiar on a local shelf and never made the history books.

🌲 A legendary creek

Wissahickon wasn't made up. It's the creek that runs down through Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, and the name comes from the Lenape - wiessahitkonk, catfish creek, or by another reading, the stream of yellowish color. By the time this label was printed it was one of the most famous stretches of woods in the East: Edgar Allan Poe wrote up a Morning on the Wissahiccon in 1844, and Thomas Moran and William Trost Richards painted it. It came with plenty of lore, too. Local legend holds that a mystic named Johannes Kelpius and his followers settled a cave along its banks in the 1690s to await the end of the world, and generations of Philadelphians grew up on tales of hermits, ghosts, and Lenape spirits said to still walk the ravine after dark. At Devil's Pool, the story goes, the Good Spirit banished the Evil Spirit into the deep, dark water, and in the Revolution Mom Rinker is said to have dropped balls of yarn off a rock above the valley with notes about the British troops wound inside.

And here's the part I love. The Wissahickon's best-known landmark is a kneeling figure in a war bonnet too, a lot like the fellow on this label: the statue on Council Rock, carved by John Massey Rhind in 1902 to replace a wooden figure that had stood there since the 1850s. Philadelphians called him Teedyuscung, after the real Lenape leader, and the rock was long believed to be where the Lenape held their councils, the figure kneeling and looking west, where the tribe had gone. Historians say no council ever met there and the war bonnet belongs to the Plains, not the Lenape, but the lore stuck - and a Maryland packer reaching for a name with wild woods and old American roots knew exactly what Wissahickon meant.

🏹 About these

Every one I have is unused, about 9 by 3 1/2 inches. Frame one for a farmhouse kitchen, an Eastern Shore wall, a Philadelphia hiker who knows Forbidden Drive, or anybody whose family worked a cannery line. The supply is finite - nobody's packing Wissahickon tomato pulp anymore, and once these last unused labels are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.