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Size: 8 1/2" x 6 1/2"
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Size: 8 1/2" x 6 1/2"
The horse on this label was real. Alcazar was a champion trotting stallion bred in California by Leonard J. Rose, on the stock farm that later became the city of Rosemead. He was bought by August Uihlein and Frederick Pabst, two of the biggest names in Milwaukee brewing, and in 1898 a cigar was named for him. Decades later, after the Great Depression had killed the original brand, a Cleveland cigar maker named J.C. Newman bought the Alcazar name, and this embossed box label is from that company's years in Cleveland.
Size: 8 1/2" x 6 1/2" ~
A dark bay stallion stands in profile on green turf with a racetrack curving behind him. Over his back, ALCAZAR is lettered in red script outlined in gold dots. To the right sits a long clubhouse or stable with a pennant reading ALCAZAR, and a sign on its front reading HOME OF ALCAZAR 2:20½.
At lower left, a gold-beaded rosette with a red bow and a jockey's crop holds a striped racing cap and the words RECORD 2:20½ and RECORD 3 YRS. 2:23. At lower right, an orange medallion hung from a ribbon printed with a running greyhound lists his offspring and their marks:
The ribbon below reads 9 IN 2:30 AND BETTER. Across the bottom of the picture: ALCAZAR 2:20½ by SULTAN 2:24, SIRE OF STAMBOUL 2:07. Beneath that, in tiny capitals, is the line that dates the label: TITLE AND DESIGN REGISTERED BY M & N CIGAR MFGRS. INC., CLEVELAND, O. A separate red name panel with ALCAZAR in white and gold letters is printed lower on the same sheet.
The picture, the lettering, the rosette and the medallion are all embossed. Turn the sheet over and the whole design stands out in reverse relief on the plain white back: the horse, the script title, the stable, the rosette and the name panel, pressed right through the paper.
That registration line settles when this label was printed. M. & N. Cigar Manufacturers, Inc. did not exist until 1927, when J.C. Newman merged his Cleveland company with Grover Mendelsohn's, the only other cigar factory left in the city. According to J.C. Newman's own history of the brand, the original Alcazar cigar did not survive the Great Depression, and it was only afterward that Newman bought the rights. In 1938, separately, he bought out his partner Grover Mendelsohn and became sole owner of M&N. The label also still gives the company's home as Cleveland, Ohio, and the firm moved to Tampa, Florida in 1954. So this label was printed by the Cleveland M&N company after it took over Alcazar, somewhere between the 1930s and the 1950s.
Other surviving copies of this same design carry the imprint of the Consolidated Lithographing Corporation of Brooklyn, New York, a label house founded in 1925 by the Romanian-born lithographer Jacob A. Voice.
Alcazar came out of one of the most important trotting nurseries in nineteenth-century America. He was bred by Leonard J. Rose at Rosemead, Rose's stock farm in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. His sire was Sultan, a son of The Moor, and his dam was Minnehaha, known as "The Broodmare of the Turf." In May 1889 Alcazar was still at Rosemead alongside Minnehaha, Mascot and Stamboul.
Stamboul, the half-brother named on the label, was the star of the family. He won a $20,000 stallion race, took a record of 2:07½, and was later sold for $50,000, after which Rose stopped breeding trotters. The label rounds his mark to 2:07.
What put Alcazar on a train east was a deal that fell through. In May 1889 Rose wanted $200,000 for Rosemead and its trotters — Alcazar, Mascot, Minnehaha and above all Stamboul — and no buyer met it. So he took the horses to New York himself: Stamboul, two brood mares and forty-eight head, and sold very nearly the whole asking price off the auction floor instead. Alcazar himself didn't sell in 1889. He went under the hammer in March 1890, at the Kellogg sale in New York, and was bought for $25,800 by August Uihlein, of the family that ran the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, and Frederick Pabst of the Pabst brewery. That was not a rich man's whim. Uihlein went on to keep between five hundred and eight hundred trotting-bred horses at his farm at Truesdell, Wisconsin — more, it was said, than any other man in the world — and in 1907 he gave $9,000 at the Old Glory Sale for a colt called The Harvester, who took the Kentucky Futurity the next year and eventually trotted in 2:04¼. Uihlein is in the Wisconsin Harness Racing Hall of Fame. So a colt foaled on a stock farm in the San Gabriel Valley became the property of Schlitz and Pabst money, and a decade later his name was on a cigar in the city those two families brewed in.
The names on the medallion carry that Rose world with them. Reverie, the yearling "sold at $10,000," is one of the horses the Harness Racing Museum credits to Rose's breeding program.
Leonard John Rose was born in Bavaria in 1827 and died in Los Angeles on May 17, 1899. At Sunny Slope he built his winery, the L.J. Rose Wine Company, and in 1887 he sold Sunny Slope to an English company at a large profit that cleared his debts. His horses lived at Rosemead, a few miles south, where he kept The Moor, Fleetwing, Maggie Mitchell and Minnehaha and bred Stamboul, Alcazar, Beautiful Bells, Hinda Rose and Reverie.
Rose wasn't the only man in California breeding trotters for speed. Up north, railroad man Leland Stanford had his famous Palo Alto Stock Farm, and his top stallion there was Electioneer, a son of Hambletonian that Stanford bought in 1877. That farm is the ground Stanford University stands on today. And here's the part I love: in November 1889 Rose bought fifteen colts from Stanford for Rosemead, paid $18,000 for them, and told the Herald he wasn't quitting trotting altogether, just putting more of his attention into Thoroughbreds.
The stock farm outlived its horses. Rosemead Stock Farm became the city of Rosemead, California, and in 1997 Rose was elected an Immortal of the Harness Racing Hall of Fame. Every Alcazar label is, in a small way, an advertisement for a horse farm that turned into a Los Angeles County town.
The cigar came first in the Midwest. Alcazar cigars were created in 1898 in honor of the champion, and the brand is credited to Louis Kindling, a German immigrant cigar maker in Milwaukee, the home city of Uihlein and Pabst. Kindling had gone into partnership with Milwaukee cigar man Edward Aschermann in December 1883, and a surviving Alcazar Jockey Club cigar box from the Louis Kindling Co. carries a 1917 tax stamp. Alcazar was immensely popular across the Midwest until the Great Depression ended it.
The man who brought it back was Julius Caesar Newman, a Hungarian immigrant who, in 1895, made a cigar table from old boards in his family's barn in Cleveland, borrowed $50 for tobacco, and filled a first order of 500 cigars for the family grocer. J.C. Newman's first Cleveland shop was registered as Factory 270 in the 18th District, and today the Newmans are known as America's oldest cigar family. By 1916 he had added factories in Marion and Lorain, Ohio, and employed 700 people. The cigarette's rapid rise was the cigar trade's big problem through the 1920s, and in 1927 Newman and Grover Mendelsohn, the last two cigar manufacturers standing in Cleveland, joined forces as M&N. Through the Great Depression, J.C. Newman ran two shifts making two-cent cigars and kept his people employed. After the Depression, Newman bought the Alcazar rights and kept the famous horse on the box.
In 1954 the company left Cleveland for Tampa's Ybor City and moved into the Regensburg cigar factory, built in 1910 and one of the last and largest cigar factories ever built in Tampa. The M&N name held until 1997, when the company became the J.C. Newman Cigar Company again. It is still family owned, and Alcazar is still in its line, now handmade in Nicaragua. The horse on your label outlived his owners, his breeder, his first cigar maker and the company name printed under his feet.
The golden age of the American cigar label began in the 1890s, when lithographers added embossing to their printing. Brass dies were engraved to match the image, a raised male die and a recessed female die were lined up with the printed sheet, and a 30-ton press drove the design into the paper so the horse, the lettering and the beaded borders stand up off the surface. Gilding was coordinated with the embossing, using either genuine gold leaf or bronzing powder.
Label collectors tell it this way: the finest labels were gilded with real gold. Some genuinely were, laid on as gold leaf, while many others used metallic bronzing that looks nearly the same in the hand. Cigar labels were made to be thrown away as boxes were emptied, and they did not become a popular collectible until the late 1970s. The unused ones that remain are what is left of some of the most technically demanding work in American commercial printing, and the artists who drew them were almost never credited.
In Alcazar's day, a trotter who could go a mile in 2:30 or better had met the standard, and the American trotting breed is named for it: when the National Association of Trotting Horse Breeders opened the first national registry in 1879, the "Standardbred" was a horse able to trot a mile within two minutes and thirty seconds. A stallion's worth as a sire was counted in how many of his foals did it. That is why the medallion boasts 9 IN 2:30 AND BETTER, and why Stamboul's name is dropped into the caption: a buyer who followed the trotters knew exactly what those numbers meant, the way a baseball fan reads a batting average.
Yes. Alcazar was a trotting stallion with a record of 2:20½, bred by Leonard J. Rose at Rosemead, California, by Sultan out of the famous broodmare Minnehaha. He was later bought by Milwaukee brewers August Uihlein and Frederick Pabst.
The label is registered to M & N Cigar Mfgrs. Inc. of Cleveland, a company formed in 1927. J.C. Newman acquired the Alcazar brand after the Depression, and the company moved to Tampa in 1954, so the label was printed between the 1930s and the 1950s.
The 1927 union of J.C. Newman's Cleveland cigar company and Grover Mendelsohn's Mendelsohn Cigar Company. It traded as M&N until 1997, when it took back the J.C. Newman Cigar Company name, and it is still making cigars today.
Alcazar's half-brother by Sultan and the most famous horse Leonard J. Rose ever bred. He set a record of 2:07½ and was sold for $50,000.
Yes. J.C. Newman still sells Alcazar, now handmade in Nicaragua, and the brand still traces its name to the champion racehorse.
Because the design was embossed. Metal dies pressed the image into the sheet, so the back shows the horse, the lettering and the borders in reverse relief.
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