Antique Peter Schuyler Odd Moments Cigar Box Label 🚬 G.W. Van Slyke Horton Albany NY Embossed Chromolithograph

Peter Schuyler "Odd Moments" Cigar Box Label 🏛️ G.W. Van Slyke & Horton, Albany, New York

Size: 6" x 4 3/4"

Albany's first mayor, wig and all, on a cigar label. PETER SCHUYLER arches across the top in raised gold over his portrait in a gold-beaded ring - long curled wig, red coat, white neckcloth - then G.W. VAN SLYKE & HORTON and ODD MOMENTS on a soft pale blue ground. It's new old stock, never on a box, and the gold is embossed so deep the whole design shows up backwards on the back. I have a stack, so yours will look just like this one.

🏛️ The Man in the Wig

Pieter Schuyler was born on September 17, 1657, in Beverwyck - the Dutch name for the town that became Albany - into one of Albany's big Dutch families, and grew up in the family house on State Street. His father, Philip Pieterse Schuyler, had come over from Amsterdam. In July 1686, when Governor Dongan's charter made Albany a city, he was appointed its first mayor, and he kept the job until 1694. As mayor he also headed Albany's commissioners for Indian affairs - he had the trading background and the language for it, and the Iroquois called him "Quidor," their way of saying Peter. Those were the Haudenosaunee, the Five Nations of the Iroquois: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. Through the almost nonstop wars of his day they mostly sided with the English, partly because Albany sat close to their homeland and was easy to trade with, and partly because Schuyler was so good at dealing with them. He was colonel of the Albany militia and led the attack on La Prairie in 1691, served as acting governor of New York in 1709 and again in 1719-20, and in 1710 he sailed to London with the "Four Indian Kings," the Iroquois leaders who were the talk of Queen Anne's court. He died on February 19, 1724, at 66. When Albany turned 200 in 1886, the city put a bronze bicentennial tablet on the side of City Hall naming him as its first mayor, and it's still up there today.

🚬 "Get Back of a Peter Schuyler"

George Washington Van Slyke, born in Dutchess County around 1831, came into Albany's tobacco trade in 1867 as partner to tobacconist Edward Gee at 377 Broadway. They moved to 40 State Street, split up around 1870, and Van Slyke carried on alone at 417 Broadway until 1880, when his agent Wallace Horton came in as partner and the firm became G.W. Van Slyke & Horton. From 1885 the Peter Schuyler cigar was their main brand. By 1888 they ran a five-story factory with 175 hands; after World War I they built a big new plant on Clinton Avenue, and by 1922 they had factories in Albany, Kingston and Poughkeepsie plus a leased one in Catskill, with their cigars in 50,000 stores across New York and New England. The 1926 ads told Albany to "Get back of a Peter Schuyler," and Peter Schuylers were still being advertised with that same line well into the 1950s. Around 1936 they closed in Albany and moved to Kingston, and by the end of 1946 the company was a division of the Schwartz Brothers Cigar Corporation.

Later on the Van Slyke & Horton name turns up in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, down in York County - a real cigar town, with 109 cigar factories in 1927 and a fifth of all the nickel cigars made in America. The federal trademark records list G.W. Van Slyke & Horton, Inc. of Red Lion as the owner of two brands that J.C. Winter & Co. had registered: Pennsylvania Dutchman in 1961 and Winter's Pennsylvania Dutchman in 1963. And in 1999 The Cigar Label Gazette reported that the one cigar factory still running in Red Lion was the Van Slyke & Horton factory, owned by Clark Jacobs - still very active at about ninety - and making Brooks and Canadian Club cigars.

🔎 Dating It

Look just under the portrait: REG. IN U.S. PAT. OFF. AND CANADA. That style of trademark notice comes from the Trademark Act of 1905, so this label was printed after that, somewhere in Peter Schuyler's long run - the soft blue ground and clean gold letters fit the 1900s into the 1920s. The AND CANADA means the mark was registered up north as well. On this side of the border, Van Slyke & Horton's federal registration for the Peter Schuyler portrait mark - PETER SCHUYLER FIRST MAYOR OF ALBANY, with a bust of a man in colonial dress framed in rings - was granted on July 4, 1911, as registration number 82,538, and it was renewed until it finally lapsed in 1992.

📜 The Stories

Old Albany lore says the Schuyler name carried so much weight with the old Dutch families that putting it on a product was as good as a letter of reference. Collector lore holds that Odd Moments was meant for the gentleman who smoked not out of habit but as a little pause in a busy afternoon - about the best description of a cigar I've heard - and that the brand kept the first mayor's face for decades because it was simply too dignified to give up. The printers, the old story goes, treated embossed labels like this as showcases of everything a stone and a die could do. And some dealers tell a story about one warehouse mishap that left most surviving copies damaged in the same corner.

A fine one framed for anyone from Albany or the Hudson Valley.