Antique 1930s Canadian Club Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Maple Leaf, Brooks & Co's, Red Lion, PA

Was Canadian Club Really a Pennsylvania Cigar? 🍁 Canadian Club Embossed Cigar Label, T. E. Brooks & Co., Red Lion, Pennsylvania - 5¢

Size: 8 1/4" x 7" ~ little to no wear

The maple leaf is really neat if you look at it closely - very talented work, with the gold embossed right up off the paper. Canadian Club, Manufactured by T. E. Brooks & Co., a red 5¢ shield in the corner, and down at the very bottom in tiny type, Consolidated Lithographing Corporation, Brooklyn, N.Y. It's the inner lid label, never used. Yours will look just like this one.

🍁 A Maple Leaf From Pennsylvania

There was nothing Canadian about it. Canadian Club was a Red Lion, Pennsylvania nickel cigar from T. E. Brooks & Co. - the brand name goes back to 1894 in the cigar-history records, and the Canada was pure sales talk, the same trick that put Havana on cigars that never left the state. Thomas E. Brooks got into the business in 1900, when he joined D. A. Horn, S. S. Sechrist and Fred Smith to form the Porto Rico Cigar Co., and then built his own house; his Tebson brand even carries his name, TE-B-son. Brooks made Have A Sweet and Tebson too, and in 1963 bought the old Baltimore maker of Uncle Willie, the nickel cigar H. L. Mencken swore by.

🏭 Red Lion, the Nickel-Cigar Town

Red Lion, down in York County, was a cigar town through and through - from the 1880s to the 1930s one of America's leading makers of the five-cent cigar. By 1927 it had 109 cigar factories and turned out a fifth of all the nickel cigars made in America, and an old-timer remembered the First World War years this way: "Business was very good. They couldn't make enough cigars - soldiers smoked a lot. That's when Brooks and all those big fellows made all their money." In 1934 the town went through a violent cigar strike. Local lore has it that the road where the factories stood is still called Cigar Row, and last I knew the town still celebrates New Year's Eve by raising a giant cigar at midnight - the Cigar Label Gazette wrote it up in 1999: an eight-foot cigar held by a big lion rising to the top of the Red Lion Historical Society building on the town square, with 1,500 to 2,000 people watching. Brooks itself was bought by Red Lion's G. W. Van Slyke & Horton in 1979, and in 1999 Van Slyke & Horton, owned by Clark Jacobs, then about ninety, was still making Brooks and Canadian Club cigars; it closed in 2011 as the town's last cigar factory.

🔎 Dating It

That little printer's line settles it. Consolidated Lithographing Corporation was formed in 1926 out of the old Pasbach-Voice company and printed in Brooklyn until 1952, so this sheet can't be older than 1926 - and the 5¢ price and the dealers who handle these all put it in the 1930s. Honestly, it can take me hours to research a piece like this, but little facts like these make it all worthwhile.

Gorgeous framed in a den or by a home bar - shadowbox it a little off the glass and that embossing really shows. This item has reached full antique status. The supply is finite - nobody's embossing Canadian Club cigar labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.