Antique 1920s Butterfly Gold Embossed Can Label ✨ Westernville, Oneida County, NY

Who Packed Butterfly Brand Beets? 🦋 Butterfly Brand Strawberry Beets, Olney & Floyd, Westernville, Oneida County, New York

Size: 14" x 4 1/2" ~ Little to no wear.

Gold you can feel! This is an antique 1920s Butterfly Brand can label for Strawberry Beets, packed by Olney & Floyd of Westernville, Oneida County, New York, and it has never been on a can. The butterfly, the lettering and the little EXTRA CHOICE cartouche are all embossed and gilded, so you can run a finger over them. They really don't make them like this anymore.

🔍 What's on it

On the left, Butterfly BRAND with a tiny butterfly perched on the end, over a bunch of beets with their tops in the grass, and Strawberry Beets underneath. In the middle, an ornate gold scroll cartouche reads EXTRA CHOICE. On the right, a big butterfly with its wings spread over a meadow, Butterfly Brand in raised gold script, and Packed by OLNEY & FLOYD, Westernville, ONEIDA CO., N.Y. A row of embossed gold dots runs along the top and bottom. Down in the lower left corner, in very tiny type, is the printer's line, ...RICE BROS. & CO., N.Y., with the first letter too small to be sure of. The back is blank paper with the embossing showing through in relief.

🌽 Olney & Floyd, the canners of Oneida County

George B. Olney and C. Frank Floyd started Olney & Floyd as a partnership in Westernville in 1880, and at first corn was the only thing they canned. It was all handwork: the corn was cut and shucked by hand, packed into the cans and labeled by hand, and the tins were filled and soldered one at a time. Canners in those days spent their winters making their own cans, and in November of 1881 the local paper reported that Olney & Floyd had bought a whole boat load of Welsh tin, which came in on the Black River Canal. That tin was so good that the scrap pile near the factory still glistened in the sun more than 70 years later!

In 1884 they bought three or four acres by the Mohawk River at Delta and built the first canning factory in that area, with a 95-foot chimney towering over it and long sheds for the horse-drawn wagons full of sweet corn. By 1886 the two factories together were putting up a million cans a year, and the line grew to succotash, green and yellow beans, peas, pumpkin, squash, tomatoes, spinach, red kidney beans, lima beans and beets, just like the ones on this label. In 1891 the Rome Sentinel reported 400,000 cans of corn at Delta alone, and the Westernville factory did the same. Their canned goods went to Denver, Salt Lake City, Boston, Philadelphia, Vermont, New Hampshire and New York City, and around the turn of the century Oneida County canned more produce than any other county in New York.

Here's the part I love. The Delta factory closed in 1907 to make way for the Delta Dam, built from 1908 to 1912 to feed the Barge Canal and keep the spring floods off Rome. The whole old village of Delta, homes, roads and even two cemeteries, was moved or torn down, and it lies under Delta Lake today. Olney & Floyd built a new factory at Lee Center to replace it, where the family employed over 200 people at their peak and sold to grocers like Loblaws and A&P. The Lee Center plant finally closed in 1971.

⚙️ The Olney machinery

In 1909 George J. Olney, G.B.'s son, started experimenting with better machinery for the canning factory. His first patented invention was the Olney Mixer in 1915, and in 1920 came the first Olney Washer for cleaning peas. In the spring of 1921 they tried one out at the Stittville Canning Co., and Stittville didn't buy it! It caught on anyway, and by 1925 seventy of them went into pea cleaning lines in that one year alone. G.J. Olney equipment went on to work in processing lines all over the U.S. and Canada and as far away as Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Europe, South America and South Africa.

🏔️ Westernville

Westernville is a little hamlet north of Rome with some big history. General William Floyd, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, made his last home there, and his house on Main Street, finished in 1803, is a National Historic Landmark. And the Olney name stayed part of the town: after David Woods, who started the Woods Valley ski area in Westernville in 1964, passed away in 1988, the Olney family owned it until the Woods family bought it back in 2011.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That long, narrow shape looks great framed over a kitchen doorway or a pantry shelf, and it's a perfect gift for a gardener, a beet lover, or anybody with roots in Rome and Oneida County.

Labels like this are a reminder of a bygone era, and the lithography and embossing on them are unparalleled even to this day, in my opinion. Museums and art institutes have galleries dedicated to them, and more and more collectors are seeking them out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.