Antique Emilia Garcia Cigar Box Label 🌅 Embossed Mild Blend Gran Fabrica de Tabacos NOS 1920s

Who Made Emilia Garcia Cigars? 🌅 Havana on the Label, Pennsylvania Behind the Brand

Size: 9 1/2" x 7"

She stands on a green globe lettered Primeros Puros, a harbor of sailing ships behind her, a sunburst at her back, crowned coats of arms on either side and stacks of raised gold coins at her feet. Everything on this label says Havana. The brand is recorded as one of the leading lines of the East Prospect Cigar Company of East Prospect, Pennsylvania, a York County borough on the Susquehanna that counted 929 people in 2020. And the hairline of type along the bottom edge names the Brooklyn shop that printed the whole dream: CONSOLIDATED LITHOGRAPHING CORPORATION BROOKLYN N.Y.

This is an unused Emilia Garcia inner cigar box label, the Mild Blend, New Old Stock. It measures 9.5 x 7 inches, printed in full color with gold, and deeply embossed. It never went inside a box lid.

🔎 What Is on the Label

EMILIA GARCIA arches across the top in gold-edged capitals. GRAN FABRICA DE TABACOS, "great tobacco factory", is set in two short lines either side of the central figure's head. She wears a rose-pink gown with a green drape over her shoulders and her hair pinned up, and holds a cigar in one hand and a small round vessel in the other. Behind her a coastline of palms and red-roofed buildings curves around a bay full of sailing ships under a rising sun. Beneath her feet a bank of cloud gives way to a still life of the trade: stacked cigar boxes, strapped bales, a barrel and an open box of cigars.

Gold scrollwork frames the oval. The coin clusters at left and right stand up from the paper in real relief, MILD BLEND sits under the oval, and the brand name runs a second time across the foot of the sheet in large gold-edged letters. Turn the label over and the embossing reads through in reverse: coins, palm fronds and lettering pressed right through the stock. That relief was struck after the colors were printed, and it is the part of a label like this that a flat photograph loses.

🖨️ The Printer: Jacob Voice and Consolidated Lithographing

The imprint is the label's best witness to its age. Jacob A. Voice, a lithographer born in Romania in 1884, went to work in 1903 for Wm. Steiner & Sons, a label firm descended from Steiner & Rosenthal of 1884. Voice had organized a company of his own by 1911, and around 1925 his firm and Steiner's came together under a new name, Consolidated Lithographing Corporation. So a sheet carrying that name was printed in 1925 or later, which puts this Emilia Garcia in the 1920s at the earliest.

By 1933 Voice was the leading name in the trade: Fortune magazine, that March, called him America's foremost maker of cigar-box art. In 1935 he gave the Museum of the City of New York a collection of cigar box labels, and the New-York Historical Society keeps a collection of cigar bands gathered by Sidney Voice, the firm's vice-president. Both collections are part of the Consolidated legacy. Jacob Voice died in 1942.

✨ How a Label Like This Was Made

Cigar box labels became commonplace in the middle of the 19th century, once chromolithography made a handsome printed label cheap enough to glue into a box. Some used more than twenty colors, each laid down in a separate pass, and many were embossed afterwards, with the raised parts picked out in gold or bronze. By the 1920s machine-made cigars, and fast presses running light metal plates, were replacing the heavy Bavarian limestones the old labels had been drawn on. The Emilia Garcia still carries the full treatment: color, gold and a deep die-struck relief.

🏭 East Prospect and the York County Cigar Trade

East Prospect was settled in 1849 and incorporated as a borough in 1873. It covers about a third of a square mile inside Lower Windsor Township, on the York County side of the Susquehanna River, and it counted 250 people in 1880 and 929 in 2020. For a town that size it made a remarkable number of cigars.

George Prowell, the county's historian, wrote in 1907 that the places receiving the greatest benefit from cigar making were Hanover, Red Lion, Dallastown, Yoe, Windsorville, Hellam, Seven Valley, East Prospect and the city of York. The York internal revenue office counted twelve hundred cigar factories in the county that year, turning out three hundred million cigars and paying nearly a million dollars a year in federal tax. By the early 1900s cigar making employed more York Countians than any other industry. Many makers were small family businesses working out of the home or a building behind it; others grew to run several plants.

In a single month in the fall of 1917 a county gazette listed fourteen new cigar factories, from two hands to forty, some of them run by women. One line reads simply: Curvin M. Dellinger, East Prospect, two hands. In October 1929 fifteen million cigars were shipped out of the Red Lion station on the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad.

By 1931 East Prospect's cigar houses included A.F. Burg, Q.S. Overmiller, the Temple Cigar Company and the National Cigar Company. The largest was probably the East Prospect Cigar Company, known in the trade as E. P. C. Co., whose major brands were Epco, Las Vegas, Emilia Garcia, Airdale and Flyer. Its Epco label carried the line "Title & Design Owned by E. P. C. Co."

📜 Lore of the Leaf

York County's cigar story goes back further than its labels. The folk artist Lewis Miller drew boys making cigars at William Spangler's tobacco shop in 1811, and the county's own histories date the boom in tobacco farming to 1837, when new varieties and heavier fertilizing made the leaf thrive. The tradition that followed was the family shop, and the count of "hands", which is exactly how that 1917 gazette recorded Curvin Dellinger.

🌎 Why a Pennsylvania Brand Speaks Spanish

Gran Fábrica de Tabacos means "great tobacco factory"; Primeros Puros reads as "first-rate cigars". The harbor, the palms, the crowned shields, the bales and the barrel are the picture language of the Caribbean tobacco trade, and Havana was the name every smoker at a counter knew. Round tins lettered for Emilia Garcia Havana cigars survive as well. The two words in plain English at the foot of the oval, MILD BLEND, were written for the American buyer holding the box.

And the Havana look was a crowded field. Down in Tampa the Ybor City factories rolled Clear Havanas, American-made cigars of all-Cuban leaf, and in 1929 those factories turned out 500 million cigars. New York was an old cigar town too: in the strike of 1877 more than ten thousand of its cigar makers walked out of the factories and tenement rooms. York County played its own game. By the 1920s its cigar manufacturers' association was billing the county as "the home of the five cent cigars", and about one American cigar in five was made there. Put this Brooklyn-printed label for an East Prospect brand next to anything that came out of Tampa or Manhattan and, to my eye, it holds its own.

🗂️ The Emilia Garcia Trail

The brand turns up on more than paper labels. Besides the round tins, a die-cut tri-fold counter display for Emilia Garcia cigars was lithographed by the Industrial Litho Company of Brooklyn. Dealers in cigar ephemera describe the Emilia Garcia inner label as heavily embossed and gilded, and name Consolidated Lithographing Corporation as its lithographer.

🖼️ Condition and Display

New Old Stock: an inner label that was printed, stacked and never used. The colors are bright and the gold relief stands proud. For framing, a spacer or a deep mat keeps the glass off the embossing, and a dark mat lets the gold and the pink gown come forward. It suits a study, a home bar or a wall of tobacciana, and it is a strong gift for anyone with York County roots.

❓ Questions People Ask

How old is this Emilia Garcia cigar label?

Its bottom edge prints the name Consolidated Lithographing Corporation, which Jacob Voice's Brooklyn firm adopted around 1925. A label with that imprint cannot be older than 1925.

Who made Emilia Garcia cigars?

Emilia Garcia is listed among the major brands of the East Prospect Cigar Company, E. P. C. Co., probably the largest of several cigar makers in the small borough of East Prospect in York County. The label itself names only its printer.

What do the Spanish words on the label mean?

Gran Fábrica de Tabacos is "great tobacco factory" and Primeros Puros is roughly "first-rate cigars". The Spanish lends the prestige of Havana to a cigar sold to American smokers.

Is the gold printed or raised?

Raised. The coins, scrollwork and lettering were die-embossed after printing, and the relief shows through on the back of the sheet in reverse.

What is an inner cigar box label?

The inner label was pasted inside the lid, so it was the picture a smoker saw each time he opened the box.

How big is it?

9.5 x 7 inches, a good size for a standard frame with a mat.