Antique 1910s-1920s Embossed Cigar Label 🎩 Engagement Keepsake | F.X. Smith's Sons Elegant Inner Label

What Did a 1910s Engagement Cigar Label Show? 🎩 She Is Looking at Her Ring. He Is Smoking an Engagement.

Size: 9 1/2" x 7"

In the gold oval on the wall, a young woman with a pink ribbon in her hair looks down at her own hand and the ring on her finger. Below her, a young man in a dark suit leans back from his desk with a cigar, smiling. On that desk sits an open box of cigars, and the label inside its lid is this very picture, printed small: Engagement.

The brand belonged to F.X. Smith's Sons Co. of McSherrystown, Pennsylvania, and the fine print along the bottom of the label says so: "TITLE & DESIGN OWNED BY F.X. SMITH'S SONS CO. McSHERRYSTOWN, PA." Francis Xavier Smith started that business in 1863, the summer Union and Confederate cavalry fought through the streets of neighboring Hanover, Pennsylvania on the eve of Gettysburg. His family was still rolling cigars in McSherrystown when the Gettysburg Times called it Adams County's last cigar maker in 2012. In 2018 the company was sold and production moved to the Dominican Republic. One hundred fifty-five years of Pennsylvania cigar making ended, and labels like this one are what is left of its romance.

🖼️ The Label

An inner-lid cigar box label, 9.5 x 7 inches, printed on cream stock, embossed and gilded, and never glued into a box. Across the top, "Engagement" swings out in red script edged with raised gold, underlined by a long gold-trimmed flourish. At the bottom the name repeats in red block capitals with gold shading, above the one line of small type naming the owner.

The scene fills the middle. The young man sits sideways in his chair, hand on his knee, in a dark three-piece suit with a high white collar, a red tie, a white pocket square and a gold chain across his waistcoat. A green-shaded electric lamp hangs above his desk, and a trail of smoke rises from the cigar in his fingers. On the desk: a candlestick telephone, an open box of Engagement cigars with its label showing, a stack of closed cigar boxes, a wire letter tray full of papers, a rolled document and a small desk calendar. On the wall behind, in an embossed gold oval frame against a deep green ground, the woman in a draped pink gown and pink bandeau bends her head toward her ring.

Turn the label over and the back is plain cream paper, with the whole scene and both titles pressed through in reverse by the embossing die.

📅 Dating the Scene

The label dates itself by the things in the room. A candlestick telephone, an electric desk lamp with a green shade, a starched high collar on the man and a bandeau ribbon in the woman's piled hair all belong to the 1910s. They date the SCENE, which is not quite the same as the print run - a cigar house kept good artwork on the presses for years, so the label itself is 1910s-1920s. The brand itself had a long run: F.X. Smith's Sons Co. filed a U.S. trademark application for ENGAGEMENT for cigars on May 11, 1956, so the name was still being protected more than forty years after this design was new.

The picture-inside-a-picture on the desk has a name of its own in art circles, the Droste effect, after the Dutch cocoa tin of the early 1900s whose nurse carried a tray bearing the same tin. Here the trick sells a cigar: the box on the desk is the box the buyer is holding.

🏭 F.X. Smith's Sons: 155 Years in One Pennsylvania Town

Francis Xavier Smith founded the company in 1863 in Irishtown, a settlement that is now part of McSherrystown. An 1886 history of Cumberland and Adams Counties records that F. X. Smith embarked in the cigar business in 1868 while at his father's general store in Irishtown, starting with five hands; by 1886 he employed about 150 and made about 6,000,000 cigars a year. The business passed to his sons Paul and Peter, then to Joseph, then to Philip and Thomas, and by 2012 Craig Smith was running it as the fifth generation. The firm moved to 372 North Street in McSherrystown and grew into one of the area's big employers. At its height the factory had about 600 workers and turned out 60,000 to 80,000 hand-rolled cigars a day, under brand names that included Betty Ross, Lord Baltimore and Blue Ribbon along with Engagement.

The long decline of the American cigar shows in its own numbers. In 1920 Adams County had 25 cigar companies. By 2012 F.X. Smith's Sons was the only one still making cigars, down to 25 employees and 15,000 to 20,000 cigars a day, with machines running twice a week. The family was preparing to mark 150 years in 2013. McSherrystown was home to F.X. Smith's Sons, described as the oldest operating family-run cigar manufacturer in the United States. Five years later the business was sold, and its cigars were made in the Dominican Republic from then on.

🏘️ McSherrystown and Irishtown

McSherrystown takes its name from Patrick McSherry (1725-1795), an Irish immigrant whose family came from around Newry in Ulster. In 1763 he bought a 300-acre tract from the Digges family and laid it out in five-acre lots; the first known deed for one of them is dated June 27, 1765. Catholics were here from the very start. Catholic families had been coming up out of Maryland onto the Digges land since about 1730, Germans and Irish among them, and the Jesuits' Conewago Chapel, two miles north of town, put up a stone church between 1785 and 1787 that still stands as the oldest Catholic church built of stone in the United States. Pope John XXIII made it a minor basilica in 1962. The borough was incorporated in 1882, and by the 1885 census of cigar manufacturers it counted at least eight cigar factories. The tobacco farms of York and Lancaster counties were close at hand, and in the years before the First World War cigar making was probably the fastest-growing industry in all of Adams County. It sits against Hanover on the York County line, a little over a dozen miles east of Gettysburg, and in 2020 it had 3,077 residents. Next door in York County, cigar making began in the home: a farmer worked his land by day while his wife stripped tobacco and rolled cigars, and women who had started rolling on the farm made up many of the factory workers, paid on a bonus rate that rewarded production. Its later claim to fame was as the home base of Boyds Bears.

The Civil War came right up to its edge. On June 30, 1863, Confederate cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart collided with Union cavalry in the streets of Hanover, the fight that helped delay Stuart's ride to join Lee at Gettysburg. F.X. Smith's cigar business was born that same year, a few miles away in Irishtown.

💌 Selling a Moment

Cigar makers named brands for the moments men wanted to mark, and an engagement is one of the oldest. The label does not show a proposal. It shows the hour after: the ring is on her finger in the portrait, and he has sat back to enjoy a cigar about it. A buyer lifting the lid of a box of Engagements was invited into that satisfied, slightly smug evening, which is a better advertisement than any list of tobacco blends. Collectors tell a story that the Engagement label was meant to have a companion, a Married label to carry the romance from proposal to altar.

🔎 Size and Condition

9.5 x 7 inches. New old stock, never applied to a box. Bright color, raised gold embossing, and a clean back showing the embossed design in reverse.

❓ Questions People Ask

Who made Engagement cigars?
F.X. Smith's Sons Co. of McSherrystown, Pennsylvania, a family cigar maker from 1863 until the business was sold in 2018.

What does "Title & Design Owned By" mean?
It marks the brand name and the picture as the company's own property rather than a stock label that any cigar maker could order.

How old is the label?
It is a 1910s-1920s label. The candlestick telephone, electric lamp and fashions in the picture.

Is it an inner or outer label?
An inner label, made to be pasted inside the lid so the picture greeted the buyer when the box was opened.

What is the woman in the portrait doing?
Looking down at the ring on her hand, the engagement the brand is named for.