Antique Queen Cola Label 👑 from 1930s Punxsutawney

Remember Queen-Cola From Punxsutawney? 👑 Queen-Cola, Cold Spring Bottling Co., Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania

Size: 4" x 3" ~ Unused, never put on a bottle.

This beautiful antique 1930s Queen Cola label is out of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the hometown of the most famous groundhog in the world! It's a diamond-shaped bottle label from the Cold Spring Bottling Co., with Queen-Cola in big red script across the top and a little painted scene in the middle: a waterfall pouring over a stone wall beneath a red building, with thick green woods all around and a big old tree trunk on the left. I love that they put a picture of a cold spring on a cola label. You can practically hear the water.

🔍 What's on it

Printed in red and full color on bright yellow paper. Across the top, CONTENTS 6 OZ. and Queen-Cola. Beside the oval scene, TRADE on the left and MARK on the right. Along the bottom, COLD SPRING BOTTLING CO. and PUNXSUTAWNEY, PA. The back is plain paper, with the red lettering showing faintly through.

🥤 The Lattimers' bottling works

Punxsutawney wrote its own history for its hundredth birthday in 1949, and the Cold Spring Bottling Company has its own entry in the book. It says the business was founded in March 1901 by Henry Luhring and Harry J. Lattimer, who ran it as Luhring and Lattimer (the book mentions New Bethlehem, Pa., in its beginnings too). Their first home was the Dr. S. S. Hamilton Building on North Findley Street, which burned in the big Findley Street fire of September 15, 1903, one of three bad fires the town had between 1886 and 1903. Mr. Lattimer picked himself up and set up again in 1904, and in 1918 he took his son, Harry R. Lattimer, into partnership. By 1949 the son owned and ran the plant.

Here's the part that matters for this label. According to that same book, the Lattimers bottled and delivered a full line of their own soft drinks until 1933. After that they bottled only two franchised drinks, 7-Up and Dr. Nut (an almond-flavored soda out of New Orleans), and sent them out across Jefferson, Indiana, Clearfield and Elk Counties. Queen-Cola wasn't anybody's franchise, it was their own house cola with its own trademark, so this label comes from the years when the Lattimers were still making their own sodas. The 7-Up years show up in the town's 1944 high school yearbook, where the Cold Spring Bottling Co. congratulates "the Class of '44 with 7-Up."

🦫 Punxsutawney, the Weather Capital of the World

Punxsutawney is renowned for its Groundhog Day observance each February 2nd, where thousands of visitors and media outlets come to hear Phil's prediction. The 1949 book tells the story the town's way. The old Candlemas weather lore came over with Pennsylvania's German settlers, who decided that if the sun was out on February 2nd, a groundhog would see its shadow and head back into its hole for six more weeks of winter. As far back as 1886, a few Punxsutawney folks started heading into the woods every year to feast on groundhog, which the town considered a delicacy if properly prepared! The editor of the Punxsutawney Spirit started calling them the Groundhog Club, and the paper's city editor, Clymer H. Freas, declared that only the Punxsutawney groundhog, the Seer of Gobbler's Knob, could properly read a shadow and that all the others were impostors. Newspapers all over the country picked it up, and it's still going.

The club's summer outing in those days served spring chicken, groundhog, corn on the cob, apple pie, "and liquids for digestive purposes." I'd like to think a bottle of the local cola found its way onto that table once or twice.

🏡 Display

Vintage soda and beverage labels are treasured by collectors and art galleries worldwide, with both the color and the lithography process being hard to beat! Picture this Americana hanging as home decor 🏡 instead of in a museum 🏛! It's small enough to frame anywhere, and it would make a great gift for a soda collector, a Groundhog Day fan, or anybody with roots in Punxsutawney and Jefferson County. Paper this old can carry a light ripple, and it flattens out nicely under glass.

Don't miss out on this amazing piece of history, once it's all gone, it's gone for good! 🔥