Antique 1910s Large Elsie Cigar Label 🚬 Cute Victorian Child!

Was There an Elsie Before Borden's Cow? 👧 Large Elsie Cigar Box Label, "Smoke Elsie Cigars," Henry B. Grauley, Philadelphia

Size: 8 1/2" x 6 1/4"

This is one of the sweetest faces in my whole cigar label stock. A little girl with a straight blonde fringe leans on the sill of a round stone window in an old brick wall, arms folded, a bracelet on her wrist, looking right at you without a smile - while two bluebirds fuss over a nest of eggs in the flowering branches below her. ELSIE across the top, SMOKE ELSIE CIGARS along the bottom, and one tiny line: TRADE MARK & DESIGN OWNED BY HENRY B. GRAULEY. It's the big inner label from inside the lid, new old stock and never used. The same picture was also printed as a little square outer label, about 4 1/2 inches each way, for the outside of the box - this big one went inside the lid, where you saw it the moment you opened the box. Yours will look just like this one.

🏛️ Henry B. Grauley of Philadelphia

Henry B. Grauley was one of the biggest cigar dealers in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, with a firm called the State House Cigar Mfg. Co. - the State House being Philadelphia's old name for Independence Hall. The firm was Factory 659 of the First District, on Chestnut Street in the same block as the State House itself. Sometime before 1885 he joined forces with S. Fuguet & Sons. S. Fuguet had started out in 1818 exporting cigars and tobacco from Havana, the house became S. Fuguet & Sons when his sons joined, it opened Philadelphia offices in 1828, and by 1878 it had seven federal cigar trademarks to its name. Together they traded as Grauley & Fuguet, with 35 rollers turning out roughly 9,000 cigars a day. By 1893 the business had passed to his sons as S. & B. Grauley, and the 1905 tobacco trade directory still lists H. B. Grauley at Sixth and Chestnut, with factories number 659 at Souderton and 988 at Shelly in Pennsylvania's First District, out in the Montgomery and Bucks County cigar country. Notice the label doesn't name a printer at all - "trade mark & design owned by" means the picture was Grauley's own property, not a stock image anybody could buy.

📅 When She Was Printed

Nothing on the label is dated, but the SMOKE ELSIE CIGARS line tells you which Elsie she is. Art of the Print dates the first Elsie, without that line, to about 1885 and says the words came on a later version. The label dealers sell this same big inner label as circa 1910, and Grauley's name was still on the factory lists in 1905, so I have her as the 1910s. It's a full chromolithograph in a quiet palette of blue-gray, cream, black and flesh - no gold, no embossing, just good drawing.

🐮 Before the Other Elsie

Long before anybody thought of Elsie the Borden Cow - a cartoon in 1936, then a real Jersey named "You'll Do Lobelia" from Brookfield, Massachusetts, who was the hit of the 1939 New York World's Fair - this little Elsie was selling cigars around Philadelphia. Who she was, if she was anybody, nobody wrote down.

📜 The Stories

The story among collectors is that most old cigar labels survived by accident: when the old factories finally closed, their stockrooms still held flat after flat of labels for brands long gone, and collectors carried them off by the box, a good many of them in the 1970s and '80s. They also like to say the same artist's hand turns up across rival brands from the same city - the same girl, the same bird, the same flowering branch - because the artists moved from shop to shop and never signed a thing. And the factories nearly always had labels left over, because a box with no label on it was a box of cigars you couldn't sell.

Lovely in a simple frame - she'll look right back at you from any wall.