Antique 1930s CA Brand Sparkling Beverages Label 🥤 Thomas Wilson & Co. Rockport Massachusetts NOS

CA Brand Sparkling Beverages Label 🥤 Thomas Wilson & Co., Rockport, Cape Ann, Massachusetts

Size: 4 3/4" x 4"

An unused 1930s soda label: a big C and A in red medallions with a little painted scene of a rocky shoreline between them, "BRAND Sparkling BEVERAGES," then "FLAVOR DESIGNATED ON CROWN," "BOTTLED UNDER STRICT HYGIENIC CONDITIONS," and "PRODUCTS OF THOMAS WILSON & CO." I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🌊 The Little Bottler That Kept Going

Thomas Wilson started his bottling company in Rockport, Massachusetts, out on Cape Ann, in May of 1907, and began making his Twin Lights soda that same year - named for the twin lighthouses on Thacher Island, just off Rockport - the last operating twin lighthouses in the country, now a National Historic Landmark. The family kept it going for more than a century in the same spot. Thomas Wilson's great-grandson, Pierce Sears, was still turning out cases of Twin Lights on the family's old machinery - some of it older than World War II - until he died in 2021, just a week after he was handed a new book about the company.

CA Brand was the everyday line. "Flavor designated on crown" meant one label did for every flavor - the bottle cap told you whether it was root beer, orange or ginger ale.

📜 The Stories

The story passed around among New England soda label collectors is that "C A" stood for Cape Ann - and with a Rockport bottler, a rocky Cape Ann shore in the picture and a sister brand named for Cape Ann's own lighthouses, it's hard to argue. Local legend also has it that Thomas Wilson himself insisted on the Cape Ann scene as a mark of quality. And don't confuse him with Chicago's Thomas E. Wilson of the meatpacking Wilson & Co. - this Thomas Wilson was strictly Rockport.

Lovely framed for anyone who loves Cape Ann, Rockport or old New England soda.