Antique 1920s - 1930s Canadian Club Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Maple Leaf, Version 2, Red Lion, PA

Canadian Club "Now 2 for 5¢" Embossed Cigar Label 🍁 T. E. Brooks & Co., Red Lion, Pennsylvania

Size: 8 1/4" x 7"

This is the less common second version of the Canadian Club label, and it tells a story right on its face: "MILLIONS SOLD FOR 5¢ EACH - THE SAME CIGAR NOW 2 FOR 5¢." There's a red "Now 2 for 5¢" flash in the corner, 2 FOR 5¢ on both ends of the green panel at the foot, the autumn maple leaf, a coat of arms with a beaver on top, and at the bottom in tiny type, Consolidated Lithographing Corporation, Brooklyn, N.Y. The maple leaf is really neat up close - very talented work. Never used. I have a few of these with minor corner wear, and I've priced them the same as the mint common ones.

🪙 A Nickel Cigar Cut in Half

Red Lion, a little York County borough, was the nickel-cigar town - by 1927 it had 109 cigar factories and made a fifth of all the nickel cigars in America - and this label is that trade marking its own price down. Two-for-a-nickel cigars were called "twofers" in Red Lion, and when Brooks cut a brand that had sold "millions" at a nickel to two for five cents, it reprinted the label to shout about it. The cigarette was already winning by then: after the First World War it began to replace the cigar, and by 1940 it dominated.

In the good years, though, that trade made Red Lion a prosperous little town. Its 1924 homecoming booklet bragged that when the village incorporated in 1880 it had about 200 people and one cigar factory with three or four hands, and that it had grown into a town of 4,000 whose cigar factories employed 2,000 men and women and turned out over two hundred million cigars a year. Building lots bought for $50 twenty-five years earlier were selling for $1,800. There were three banks, every one in its own building, and one had just finished what the booklet called one of the finest bank buildings in Pennsylvania, at a cost of about $300,000. The cigar men sat on those bank boards, too - S. S. Sechrist, one of Brooks's partners in the Porto Rico Cigar Co., was among the first stockholders of the First National Bank and went on to be its president.

🏭 T. E. Brooks & Co.

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 on Red Lion's Cigar Row, making Canadian Club (a brand name dating to 1894), Tebson and Have A Sweet. Mrs. Ida Noll Ehehalt of Red Lion remembered the First World War years in a 1981 Pennsylvania Heritage oral history: "That's when Brooks and all those big fellows made all their money." Van Slyke & Horton bought Brooks in 1979 and was still making Canadian Club cigars in 1999, and the town still celebrates New Year's Eve, last I knew, by raising a giant cigar at midnight - an eight-foot one, held by a lion, up the side of the historical society building on the town square.

🛡️ The Shield Under the Beaver

That little coat of arms isn't one official design - it's the old patchwork of Canadian provincial arms. Look close and you'll find New Brunswick's galley, Nova Scotia's salmon between thistles, Manitoba's bison, Prince Edward Island's oak trees and a B C for British Columbia. Queen Victoria had the arms of the first four provinces put together for the Great Seal of Canada, and as more provinces joined, their arms got stacked onto those four in shields like this one. None of them was ever official, and Canada didn't get a coat of arms of its own until King George V proclaimed one in 1921.

🔎 Dating 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 a price cut like this one points to the hard years that followed.

Fancy labels like this one went back through the press after the color printing - one run to emboss them and another to gild the raised parts, with gold leaf or with bronze powder buffed on by a wheel a lot like a shoe-shine buffer. Shadowbox it a little off the glass so the embossing shows. This item has reached full antique status.