Antique Frings Bros Corona Cigar Label 1900s-1920s 🏷 Gold Embossed Est 1867 Tobacco Ephemera

Who Were the Frings Brothers of Philadelphia? 🍃 Frings Bros., Philadelphia: A Big Cigar Name on a Corner of Drexel's Campus

Size: 9" x 7"

Walk across Drexel University in West Philadelphia and nothing tells you that 3134 Market Street once belonged to cigars. For decades that address was home to Frings Bros., one of Philadelphia's biggest cigar-making companies from its founding in 1867 into the 1930s. The factory is long gone. This label is not. It is an antique 1900s-1920s Frings Bros. CORONA cigar label, 9 x 7 inches, gold embossed, New Old Stock, with the company's own founding year, ESTAB. 1867, printed on either side of its gold seal.

🔎 What Is on It

• FRINGS BROS. arched across the top in heavy block capitals, each gold letter edged with a row of raised beads and filled with black
• A gold seal shaped like pressed wax, carrying an interlaced FB monogram, inside a laurel wreath of gold leaves tied at the base with a black ribbon bow
• ESTAB. to the left of the seal and 1867 to the right, in plain black type
• CORONA in gold capitals inside a black ornamental cartouche with scroll brackets
• A wide plain cream field around the whole design
• Embossed: turn it over and the arched name, the wreath and seal, and CORONA all stand up from the back in reverse relief

🏭 Frings Bros. and 3134 Market Street

The Frings brothers went into the cigar business in 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, and built one of the largest cigar makers in a city full of them. I love putting that year in its place. The golden spike that joined the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah, was still two years off, and that March Congress passed the first Reconstruction Act over President Andrew Johnson's veto, carving ten former Confederate states into five military districts. The whole country was being put back together, and the Frings brothers were building a cigar company right in the middle of it. Their address was 3134 Market Street, and the ground it stood on is now part of Drexel's campus, which spread through the surrounding West Philadelphia blocks in the urban renewal of the late 1950s and 1960s. The company put its name on more than paper: Frings Bros. glass humidors survive in collections, and its 3 Bros brand turns up on cigar bands and box labels marked Philadelphia.

On this label the brothers let three things do the talking: the family name in gold, the monogram in a seal, and the date they started. ESTAB. 1867 is the company's founding year, printed decades later as a credential. It dates the firm, and the label came later.

🌆 The Cigar City on the Delaware

Frings was working in one of the great cigar towns in America. By one estimate Philadelphia had some nine hundred cigar factories by the turn of the twentieth century. Nationwide the trade then numbered in the tens of thousands of cigar factories, and since 1868 federal tax law had required every box to show where its cigars were made, by factory number, tax district and state. Theobald & Oppenheimer, making cigars since 1860, opened a new factory at 1147 North Fourth Street in 1900. Bayuk Brothers, founded in 1896, grew into the city's largest cigar producer, making Garcia y Vega and the "Philadelphia Hand Made Perfectos" that everyone came to call Phillies.

The leaf came from next door. Much of the tobacco Philadelphia rolled was grown in Lancaster County, where tobacco was the leading cash crop from 1840 all the way to 2000. And the hands were often women's: by 1915 the city's cigar factories employed 4,300 women, more than twice the number of men. The trade shaped whole neighborhoods, from Southwark to the Northern Liberties, before it faded; Bayuk closed its Philadelphia plant in 1976.

🚬 What CORONA Told the Buyer

CORONA is not a place. It is a cigar size, and the most important one: a corona runs about 5 1/2 to 6 inches with a ring gauge of 42 to 44, and it is the benchmark size against which all other cigar sizes are measured. Printed under the maker's name, it told the retailer and the smoker exactly what kind of cigar the box held, the classic straight smoke that every other shape was compared to.

🖨️ Gold, Beads and a Die

The finish on this label is all about the gold and the relief. The beaded outline on every letter of FRINGS BROS., the leaves of the laurel wreath, the rim of the seal and the letters of CORONA are pressed up from behind by an embossing die, so they catch the light as the sheet tilts. After 1890 the best cigar labels went through extra press runs just for embossing and gilding, and the back of this sheet shows that die work plainly: the whole design stands in reverse, with no ink at all. The great New York label houses grew with the trade: in 1879 Heppenheimer & Maurer alone kept 25,000 lithographic stones and 7 million cigar labels in stock, and in 1892 Heppenheimer's firm, Harris, Donaldson Brothers and others were rolled into the American Lithographic Company.

The design is spare for a cigar label, and that is its point. There is no portrait, no scenery, no allegory. A cream field, a family name, a wreath, a seal and a year: the look of a firm that expected its name alone to sell the box. The story passed down among label collectors is that what separates a merely competent cigar label from one that still stops you is the anonymous designers and the hours they poured into a single commission, printed to be packed in a box and forgotten once the first cigar was lit.

🖼️ Living With It

• Float it in a shadow box with space above the glass so the embossing keeps its shadows.
• Hang it in a Philadelphia home, a Drexel graduate's office, a study or a bar.
• Pair it with a humidor, a cigar cutter or other Philadelphia advertising.
• Give it to a cigar smoker, a tobacciana collector or a Philadelphia history buff.

❓ Questions People Ask

Was the label made in 1867? No. 1867 is the year Frings Bros. was founded. The label is a later printing - 1900s-1920s - that carries that date as the company's credential. Nothing on the sheet says when it was printed; the firm ran from 1867 into the 1930s, so the printing sits somewhere inside that run.

Where was Frings Bros.? Philadelphia, at 3134 Market Street, on ground that is now Drexel University's campus.

Was it ever used on a box? No. It is New Old Stock, never applied, with its embossing intact.

What does the FB seal mean? It is the company's monogram, the F and B of Frings Bros. interlaced in a gold seal inside a laurel wreath.

What is a corona? A cigar of about 5 1/2 to 6 inches with a 42 to 44 ring gauge, the size all others are measured against.