Antique 54 Smoking Tobacco Label 🍂 John Weisert Tobacco Co. St. Louis, Missouri – 1910s–1930s Collectible

54 Smoking Tobacco Label 🍂 John Weisert Tob. Co., St. Louis, Missouri

Size: 3 1/4" round

A round label in sky blue with a dark rim: a big yellow 54 sitting on a brown tobacco leaf, SMOKING TOBACCO, MADE BY JOHN WEISERT TOB. CO., and then the federal fine print - "Factory No. 93, 1st Dist. of Mo. Notice - The Manufacturer of this Tobacco has complied with all the requirements of law. Every person is cautioned under these penalties of law, not to use this package for tobacco again." Then ST. LOUIS, U.S.A., and a tiny printers' union bug with an 8. Never used; the 54 shows faintly through the plain back. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🍂 Granulated 54

This was one of Weisert's workhorses. In January 1911 the company's man at the Philadelphia tobacco show named "Granulated 54" among its leading brands; in 1915 a Cincinnati report called Pike and 54 the firm's established leaders; and in 1931 Weisert was still running ads for 54 as a union-made tobacco clear out in San Francisco. Dealers call these round ones tin can labels.

🧾 That Fine Print

Factory No. 93 of the 1st District of Missouri was Weisert's own federal factory number - they even sold a "93" brand of cigar clippings. The warning not to use the package for tobacco again goes back to Section 66 of the Internal Revenue Act of July 20, 1868, so a tax-paid package couldn't just be refilled and sold again.

🏭 The Weiserts

St. Louis made about 40 percent of America's tobacco until World War I. The family started in tobacco in 1855, when John Weisert, a German immigrant, opened a business in Virginia; by 1880 the Weisert Brothers Tobacco Company was in St. Louis. John Weisert Jr. split off from it in 1902 and in 1903 moved into a five-story brick factory on South Sixth Street, where the leaf went up to the fifth floor to dry and steam. He wouldn't sell to Duke's American Tobacco Company trust, which swallowed Drummond and so many other St. Louis makers; he bought up the brand names of the firms it ruined instead, until Weisert had more than 100 brands. The cigars ended when Louis Applestein, the city's last cigar hand-roller, died at 83, and by the end the founder's grandson was the whole staff. Weisert closed in 1989, the last tobacco company in St. Louis.

📜 The Stories

Local legend has it the Weisert building was a neighborhood institution, and that the smell of tobacco processing was so much a part of the air around it that longtime residents used it like a landmark. Two more Weisert legends worth keeping: the story goes that Orphan Boy was named for a Missouri-bred prize mule that was the sensation of the 1904 World's Fair, and the Pike poster really did show the Irish Village castle built for that same Fair.

The black-and-white photo of the Weisert building is just for history - it doesn't come with the label.