Antique Blue Ribbon Cigar Box Label 🎀 M.H. Sevis & Son Springvale PA, Gold Embossed Prize Rosette, Lions Crest NOS

Who Won the Blue Ribbon? 🎀 Antique Gold Embossed Cigar Box Label, M.H. Sevis & Son, Springvale PA

4 3/4" x 4 3/4" ~

🎀 A Prize Rosette in Gold, and the Two Names Behind It

This is an original antique Blue Ribbon cigar box label, New Old Stock — never pasted to a box, never trimmed, never used. It is square with clipped corners, 4 3/4 inches each way, and it is a serious piece of printing.

BLUE RIBBON arches across the top, embossed so the letters stand off the paper, over a sunburst. At the center is a prize rosette with a ribbon banner across it reading BLUE and RIBBON, above it a small crest of two lions rampant supporting a shield, and in each upper corner a cluster of prize medallions struck with profile heads. Along the foot, heavy acanthus scrollwork surrounds a little shield carrying a single castle, which is easy to miss in all that gold.

Turn it over and there is no ink at all — just the whole design pressed through in blind relief.

And along the bottom edge, in type you could miss entirely: DESIGN REGISTERED M.H. SEVIS & SON, SPRINGVALE, PA.

🖨️ M.H. Sevis & Son Made the Label — Not the Cigars

That distinction matters and it is easy to get backwards. M. H. Sevis & Son of Springvale, Pennsylvania were a cigar box label house. They designed and registered label artwork and printed it for the cigar manufacturers who bought it. Springvale is a village in York County, and the firm is documented producing Blue Ribbon inner box labels — including one dated 1909 — for a cigar company in the next county over.

That company was Golden's of Bonneauville, in Adams County, and Blue Ribbon was their brand.

That 1909 label was the first-generation Blue Ribbon design, and it was the simpler one: a navy band on a bright green ground, with "Golden's It's Mild" on little side ribbons. About a decade later Sevis pulled out all the stops with the velvety rosette, the lions and the gold coins. The big rectangular version of that artwork, the one lettered "For Men Who Know," dates to the 1920s, and this little square carries the same rosette, lions and coins. That puts it right around a hundred years old.

🏭 Golden's of Bonneauville — the Best Business That Town Ever Had

The Bonneauville Museum keeps the record, and it is a good one. The Tobacco Trade Directory for 1906 lists four licensed cigar manufacturers in that one small town: A. J. Golden (tax no. 2464), Emery L. Golden (tax no. 2280), F. H. Smith, and A. L. Wagaman. There was at least one unlicensed maker besides.

The Goldens were, in the museum's own words, the most successful business ever to operate in Bonneauville. Blue Ribbon was their renowned brand, made from the beginning right through past the middle of the century, and the brothers are credited as its co-inventors. They started producing it in quantity in a building on West Hanover Street, outgrew that, and put up a new structure on East Hanover Street early in the twentieth century — a general store on the ground floor with cigar production upstairs. That building still stands; it is a shop today. Later they built a bigger factory a couple of blocks east, put up houses on the site for the Golden families, and a good share of the town went to work there.

The numbers are startling for a village. The Gettysburg Companion records that E. L. Golden was turning out around three million cigars a year across two factories, one in Bonneauville and one at Two Taverns. Blue Ribbon cigars were, as the museum puts it, "licensed up and down the East Coast." And the Gettysburg Times gives the end of it precisely: Golden was in business from 1895 until he produced his last cigar on 5 March 1943.

Their other brands are worth the roll call for the names alone: Bokay-Grande (the B standing for Bonneauville — Bonneauville-Okay), Bunney Boys (Bunney, again, for Bonneauville), Penn Rose, Two Homes, Grande, Two Friends, Newcomers — which landed them in a lawsuit — and Tu-Tu-Chu, a sweetened and flavored cigar made not for smoking at all but for chewing slowly.

🔗 Why Two Different Firms Appear on One Brand

Here is the thing that explains this sheet. The museum notes that factory numbers and tax numbers vary across Golden's Blue Ribbon boxes, and gives the reason: their products were often licensed to other manufacturers. A brand that popular did not stay in one building. The artwork was registered by a label house in York County, the cigars were rolled in Adams County and elsewhere under license, and the paperwork on any given box reflects whoever was making that particular run.

So what this label tells you for certain is its design registration. What the record around it tells you is which brand it belongs to, and that is a brand with a documented town, a documented family and a documented last day.

🌾 York County, Where the Cigars Came From

Springvale sat in the middle of something enormous. In 1907 there were twelve hundred cigar factories in York County alone, turning out three hundred million cigars a year. By the 1920s the York County Cigar Manufacturers Association was billing the place as "The home of the five cent cigars," and roughly twenty percent of every cigar smoked in America came out of that one county. The town of Red Lion by itself accounted for about a tenth of the national output.

That is the world a label house like Sevis served: hundreds of small manufacturers within a day's cart ride, every one of them needing artwork good enough to make a box stand out on a counter.

✨ The Gold

The gold on this label is the expensive part, and it was done with real materials and a lot of tonnage. By the early 1890s label lithographers were running presses of thirty-eight tons with precision-machined dies, embossing the sheet and laying metal into the raised areas in the same operation. In America most houses pressed bronze flake into the die; the finest work took 22 karat gold or bronze leaf, and European printers favored gold dust. Whichever it was here, it has not dulled: the letters, the crest, the coins and the scrollwork all still catch the light and shift as you tilt the sheet. The better labels of this period took twelve separate colors, each its own pass through the press, before the embossing and gilding runs even began.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🎀 Framed alone — the clipped-corner square is an unusual shape and it carries a frame well. A navy or black mat picks up the rosette.
• 🚬 Tobacciana grouping — with cigar bands, box labels and trade cards from the same era, where the shared gold embossing ties the wall together.
• 🏛️ Pennsylvania local history — Adams and York County collectors want this one specifically.
• 🎁 For a cigar smoker — particularly one who appreciates that the label was the most expensive part of the box.

🎁 Who Collects These

Cigar label and tobacciana collectors are the core, and embossed gold prize-rosette designs are among the most sought in the field. Pennsylvania local historians pursue anything tied to the York and Adams County cigar trade, which was one of the largest concentrated industries in the state. Printing and graphic-design collectors want it for the embossing and the color work. And heraldry enthusiasts turn up more often than you would expect — cigar box crests like this one have been the subject of their own academic study.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Is it original?

Yes — an original antique lithographed and embossed label, New Old Stock, never applied to a box. The gold is bright and the sheet is flat and unglued.

Did M. H. Sevis & Son make the cigars?

No. They were the label house — they designed and registered the artwork and printed it. The line on the sheet says "design registered," not "manufactured by." Blue Ribbon is documented as the brand of Golden's of Bonneauville, and Sevis is on record printing Blue Ribbon labels for them.

Does the label say Golden's anywhere?

It does not. The only name printed on it is the label house. The Golden connection comes from the documented record of the brand rather than from this sheet, and the museum's own note that Golden's products were often licensed to other manufacturers is why the paperwork on Blue Ribbon boxes varies so much.

What is the crest?

Two lions rampant supporting a red shield, under a finial and over laurel. It is heraldic in style rather than an actual granted coat of arms — borrowed grandeur, which is exactly what a prize-rosette brand wanted. The rosette and the medallions are doing the same job: they say "award winner" without naming an award.

The heraldry folks have written about this exact label, too. Murray Eiland used it as one of his examples in "Cigar Box Heraldry," published in The Armiger's News, the journal of the American College of Heraldry, in winter 2014, and he credits it to M.H. Sevis & Son of Springvale. He points out that the crest up top is built like a crown without actually being one, just lions either side of a staff, and he picked out that tiny, almost vestigial shield at the bottom with its single castle. His take on the name is a good one: he says the ribbon has to refer to the ribbons that went with cigars. Up until about the Civil War, when cigars carried no brand names at all, you bought them one at a time or in bundles of 25 or 50 tied together with a ribbon, and the first cigar boxes held those tied bundles.

How should I frame it?

Square with clipped corners at 4 3/4 inches, so it suits a small square frame with a generous mat. Use UV glass and hinge it at the back edge rather than pressing it flat — the embossing is the point, and it needs to stay proud of the surface.