Antique 1930s Velvet Rose Pumpkin Can Label 🎃 Brighton Canning Co. Iowa Country Store Advertising

A Pumpkin in a Wreath of Roses? 🎃 Antique 1930s Velvet Rose Pumpkin Can Label, Brighton Canning Co., Iowa

Size: 11" x 4 1/2"

🎃 A glowing pumpkin in a wreath of roses on one end, a single velvet-red rose on the other, and in the middle a small cream panel making the promise any farm cook wanted to hear: Velvet Rose Pumpkin is all hand washed, hand cut and individually inspected. This 1930s can label was packed by the Brighton Canning Co. of Brighton, Iowa, a Washington County farm town once known for its hogs, where a mastodon fossil turned up in 1851 and where two rival railroads once fought over a single route into town. Never used, it wraps up a good slice of how America learned to buy its pumpkin in a can.

Reading the Label

It is the full wrap-around label, 11" x 4.5" (about 28 x 11.4 cm), new old stock and never wrapped around a can. The middle panel carries the cannery's hand-washing promise and its line, PACKED BY BRIGHTON CANNING CO., BRIGHTON, IOWA, and each end is marked PUMPKIN, NET CONTENTS 1 LB. 4 OZ.

Why the Net Weight Is Printed on the Label

That small line of type is federal law at work. The Gould Net Weight Amendment, sponsored by Representative Samuel W. Gould of Maine and signed into law on March 3, 1913, required packaged food to carry the quantity of its contents plainly and conspicuously on the outside, by weight, measure or numerical count. Federal inspectors had found short-weighting to be a bigger problem than adulteration, with fully a third of the products they examined short-weighted or under-filled. The amendment made the United States the first country in the modern world to make food labeling mandatory instead of voluntary, and it paved the way for the nutrition labels on every package today. Twenty ounces of pumpkin, stated right on the wrapper, is that law doing its job.

Brighton Canning Co. and Iowa's Canneries

Everything the Brighton Canning Co. chose to say about itself is on this label: a romantic brand name, original artwork carrying its own © mark, and a promise of handwork, the pumpkin washed, cut and inspected by people. It is the pitch of a packer selling care rather than size. A Brighton Canning Company letterhead dated 1928 survives, showing the firm in business that year.

Canning was big business in Iowa. At Vinton, in Benton County, the Kelley Canning Company started in 1892 and grew into the Iowa Canning Company, with plants at Vinton, La Porte City, Garrison and Shellsburg. A 1910 county history records its best year at ten million cans and its average at eight million, from about 1,000 acres of corn near Vinton, with up to 250 people working the packing season at two of its plants. The company later added locally grown pumpkins, tomatoes, lima beans, peas and asparagus to its corn. In 1947 the Minnesota Valley Canning Company, the maker of Green Giant, bought it, and in 1959 Green Giant announced it was closing the Vinton operation.

Canned Pumpkin Goes National

In Eureka, Illinois, Dickinson and Company first canned pumpkin in 1904, relying on local farms. In 1929 Libby, McNeill & Libby of Chicago bought the company, and with it a recipe for "pumpkin custard." Mary Hale Martin, a recipe developer Libby's had hired, wrote the pumpkin pie recipe it printed on its can labels. Canned purée spared home cooks the roasting and mashing, and pumpkin pie changed from an all-day project into a mainstream Thanksgiving tradition. The Dickinson pumpkin behind it is a Cucurbita moschata, the same species as butternut squash, and whether it counts as a pumpkin or a squash is still debated. Today Libby's plant in Morton, Illinois produces as much as 95 percent of the canned pumpkin in the United States.

The Legend Inside Every Pumpkin

Every jack-o'-lantern carries an Irish folk tale. In the legend of Stingy Jack, first set down in print in the 19th century, a trickster twice outwits the Devil, once by talking him into turning into a coin and trapping him beside a silver cross, and once by stranding him up a tree with a cross carved into its bark. When Jack dies, heaven will not have him and the Devil will not take him, so he is sent into the dark with a single burning coal, which he sets inside a carved turnip to light his way. In Ireland and Scotland people carved faces into turnips and set them in windows and doorways to frighten Jack and other wandering spirits away; in England they used large beets. Immigrants brought the custom to America, where pumpkins were plentiful and far easier to carve, and the pumpkin became the Halloween lantern.

Pumpkins built a small-town tradition of their own in Eureka. The Eureka Pumpkin Festival began in 1939 to lift the town after the Great Depression and drew 10,000 visitors its first weekend to a town of 1,700. It paused after 1941 for World War II and came back bigger, drawing 50,000 people by 1947, the year Ronald Reagan and Illinois Governor Dwight H. Green crowned Joan Snyder the Pumpkin Queen. Libby's closed its Eureka cannery in November 1960 and moved the work to Morton, and the last Eureka festival was held in September 1961.

Brighton, Iowa: Hogs, a Mastodon and a Railroad War

Brighton was laid out in 1840 in Washington County, near the Skunk River where Iowa Highways 78 and 1 meet today, and it quickly grew into one of the largest centers of hog production west of the Mississippi. In 1851 David Powers discovered the fossil remains of a mastodon there, a piece three and a half feet long, fourteen inches wide at its larger end and weighing eighty-three pounds. Cholera struck the town hard in 1854. Then came 1882, when the Iowa Central Railway and the narrow-gauge Burlington and Western Railway battled over the right-of-way as both built west from Coppock toward Brighton. The Burlington and Western arrived in mid-1882, and the two lines ended up building parallel tracks down the same street, with the B&W claiming the center line. Brighton counted 600 people in the 2020 census.

What Changed

Canning consolidated. The Vinton plant that once packed millions of cans closed within a dozen years of Green Giant's purchase, and pumpkin canning that began on Illinois farms around Eureka now runs through a single Morton plant. The legacy of the small local packer is mostly paper: labels like this one, printed for a town cannery's own brand and never used.

Good For

• Fall and Thanksgiving kitchen décor
• A farmhouse pantry or country store wall
• Iowa and Washington County history
• Can label and food advertising collections

Questions People Ask

How old is this Velvet Rose label?

It is a 1930s can label for Velvet Rose Brand Pumpkin.

Is it original?

Yes. It is unused new old stock with a blank back, never applied to a can.

How big is it?

It is 11 by 4.5 inches.

Why does a pumpkin label carry a rose?

A brand name sells a feeling as well as a food, and Velvet Rose gave an everyday vegetable the look of something finer on a grocery shelf.

Is this Brighton, Colorado?

No. The label names Brighton, Iowa, in Washington County. Brighton, Colorado had canneries of its own, including the Colorado Sanitary Canning Factory.

Where does the jack-o'-lantern come from?

From Irish and Scottish turnip lanterns and the folk tale of Stingy Jack; immigrants swapped the turnip for the American pumpkin.