Antique 1930s Pearson’s Red Top Snuff Label 🍎 Byfield Snuff Co Massachusetts NOS

Who Is the Girl on the Snuff Label? 🌹 Antique 1930s Pearson's Red Top Snuff Label, Byfield Snuff Co., Byfield, Massachusetts

Size: 5 1/2" x 2 1/4"

I love this one. A long red label printed in black: PEARSON'S in fancy old letters, RED TOP on a ribbon slashing across the middle, SNUFF below it, and down at the bottom BYFIELD SNUFF CO. Byfield, Mass. On the left, in an oval, a young woman with long dark hair and a lacy collar under the words PEARSON'S MILLS. Never used. In metric it's about 14 x 5.7 cm. Snuff, if you've never met it, is tobacco ground down to a fine powder. You sniffed a pinch up your nose, or "dipped" it, which meant tucking it inside your cheek.

🏞️ Two Hundred Years of Snuff on the Parker River

Byfield is a village in Newbury, in Essex County, Massachusetts, at the head of the Parker River, and they were grinding snuff there in an old riverside sawmill by 1804. Dr. Samuel Tenny ran it until 1811, and a map from 1811 marks the spot as Tenney's Snuff Factory. Sometime between 1822 and 1837 the tobacconist Thomas R. Larkin bought it, and with his partner Orlando W. Morrill it became Larkin-Morrill Snuff. After Larkin died, his heirs sold most of the mill in the 1870s to Gorham D. Tenny and Daniel Bailey. When those two sold it on, they kept shares in the new company. In 1899 the Pearson Tobacco Company of Kittery, Maine bought the mill and it became the Byfield Snuff Company - Byfield Snuff Factory No. 1 - and they kept grinding snuff on that same spot until 1951. The river, the dam and some of the mill houses are still there. The old mill building itself is gone. The town of Newbury bought it in 1990, and it came down in April 2012.

The company kept going for decades after 1951, and it stayed with the Pearson family. That's the Pearson in PEARSON'S MILLS. The Pearsons had been millers around Byfield since the 1640s, when John Pearson came over from Yorkshire and ran the first fulling mill in the colonies. Fulling is where the wool cloth families wove at home got shrunk and thickened. He ran another mill in Byfield too. In 1860 the family turned a sawmill they had bought on Main Street into a snuff mill, later the company's Mill No. 2. The last man to run the Byfield Snuff Company was Benjamin Pearson IX, the tenth generation of Pearsons to run mills on Essex County rivers. He was still the youngest person working there when he retired at 69, so the company closed with him. His obituary called it the oldest, and maybe the last, water-powered snuff mill in the country.

Old-timers around Byfield remember the snuff mill as the small, quiet one among the village's mills - no big brick complex, just a little works shipping tins all over the country. Small or not, it outlasted every one of them. The big Byfield woolen mill burned to the ground in 1932, and after that the snuff mill was the only industry left.

📜 The Trademark

That girl and that RED TOP lettering go way back. When the Byfield Snuff Company filed for a U.S. trademark in May 1905 (registered April 1906), it described exactly this - RED TOP and a framed bust of a girl under PEARSON'S MILLS - and swore the brand had been in use since August 1885. Historic New England keeps one of these labels in its collection, and they have it as undated too.

📅 How Old Is It?

The design is 1880s, but they printed it for decades. There's no date on the label, and most dealers who carry these unused labels call them 1930s - so that's how I date it. As for her, the trademark just calls her a girl. She was the face of Pearson's Red Top from the 1880s on.

🏫 Byfield

Byfield is also home to the Governor's Academy, founded in 1763 and one of the oldest boarding schools in the country. Benjamin Pearson IX of the snuff company graduated from it, back when it was still called Governor Dummer Academy. Byfield has a few other firsts too. In 1790 a young Jacob Perkins built his machines for cutting and heading nails in Byfield. A few years later John and Arthur Scholfield, wool men from England, moved their wool-carding machines (they comb raw wool out so it can be spun) into the Newburyport Woolen Manufactory, a three-story factory on the Parker River in Byfield that was in full swing by 1795. And in 1807 the first female seminary in America, a school for young women, opened in Byfield. Mary Lyon, who went on to found Mount Holyoke, studied in Byfield too. Not bad for a little mill village.

Great for a tobacco or snuff collection, a New England history wall, or framed in a den. You'll get one like the one shown.