Antique 1930s M. T. Dwyer Artesian Birch Beer Sarsaparilla Bottle Labels NOS Paper Unused Clinton Massachusetts Pair 🍺

Size: 3.5 x 3.25 inches ~ New Old Stock, never applied. They vary a little one to the next.

🫙 What Is Sugar Color?

Look right under the big flavor name on either of these labels and you'll find three small italic words: Sugar color added. Here's the answer: sugar color is caramel color, the coloring bottlers made by heating sugar until it ran from pale gold to a deep amber-brown. Most colas still use it today. This little Clinton, Massachusetts bottler just told you so, right on the front of the label, no secret about it.

🍺 A Pair From M. T. Dwyer Co., Clinton, Massachusetts

You get two labels here, never used, both printed for M. T. Dwyer Co. of Clinton, Mass. The wide one, set sideways, is Artesian Birch Beer: CONTENTS 1 PT. 12 FL. OZ. in the corner, ARTESIAN in swooping navy capitals, BIRCH BEER in red-orange block letters, and that Sugar color added line underneath. The upright one is Artesian Sarsaparilla: ARTESIAN arched over SARSAPARILLA, the same sugar-color note, and CONTENTS 8 FL. OZ. Those contents lines weren't decoration - since the Gould Amendment, introduced by Representative Samuel W. Gould of Maine and approved by President Taft on March 3, 1913, any packaged food had to say plainly on the outside how much was inside. Both carry the same picture inside a thin red-orange border - a young woman in a yellow shawl and a patchwork skirt, a jug balanced on her shoulder, standing by a round stone well with a little roof, a rope and a wooden bucket, a tree leaning in over her head, yellow steps climbing a green slope behind her and blue hills out past the fields.

💧 Why "Artesian"

An artesian well brings water up out of the ground on its own, no pump needed, because it's under pressure down in the rock. The word traces back to Artois, in northern France, where Carthusian monks were drilling wells like that as far back as 1126. Put "Artesian" on your soda and a woman at a stone well on the label, and you've made the same promise twice: water straight from deep in the ground. Local legend has it the name was more than a slogan, and that Dwyer really did draw its water from an artesian source near Clinton.

🌲 Birch Beer, Sarsaparilla and That Sugar Color

Birch beer started as exactly what it sounds like - bark and sap from the birch tree, fermented into a drink people were making by the 1600s, with a written recipe from 1676. The modern version uses a distilled bark extract, usually from black birch, dressed up with wintergreen, cinnamon and vanilla, and it's still mostly a Northeast (and Newfoundland) thing. Sarsaparilla started life as a tropical vine, Smilax ornata, but the American version most people remember blended birch oil with sassafras - a nineteenth-century patent medicine sold for the skin and the blood, tasting close enough to root beer that most people would call it one. The sassafras half of that story ended in 1960, when the FDA banned sassafras oil in food over its main compound, safrole. As for the sugar color itself - caramel color is one of the oldest food colorings there is, made by heating sugar down into a range from pale yellow to dark brown, and it's still what puts the brown in a can of cola. On these labels, it's just printed in plain words under the name.

🥤 M. T. Dwyer and the Bottlers of Clinton

Clinton was a mill town with a soda habit - a dozen small bottlers over the years. Surviving bottles and signs from Clinton name Kleer Kool, Artesian, Million Dollar, Smack Punch, MarBert, J. F. Burke, Hastings & O'Toole, J. H. Kilcoyne, Big Boy and George A. Hartshorn, right alongside M. T. Dwyer Co., whose own painted sign read "M.T. Dwyer, Clinton Beverages." That's a whole local soda trade packed into one central Massachusetts town. Funny thing - the well-and-jug picture on these labels is still around. It's the same art you'll find today on reproduction "Artesian Birch Beer" tin signs.

🏙️ Clinton, Massachusetts

Clinton split off from Lancaster and became its own town on March 14, 1850, named for New York's DeWitt Clinton Hotel, a favorite of its founders, Erastus Brigham Bigelow and his brother Horatio - the same Bigelows behind the carpet looms. Their mills made Clinton a manufacturing town, known by 1890 for carpets and woven wire. It's a water town too: the Wachusett Dam, begun in 1897 across the Nashua River and dug by hand, was the largest gravity dam in the world when it was finished, and its reservoir filled in 1908, putting part of Clinton and its neighbors underwater. It still supplies water to nearly three million people around Boston. Fuller Field, laid out in 1878, claims the title of the oldest continuously used baseball field in the world. By 1930, around when these labels were printed, about 12,800 people called Clinton home, up in Worcester County.