Antique Root Beer Label 🧴 Sanitary Brand, Indiana Harbor Indiana, Jester & Castle NOS Lehmann S.F.

🎭 What was a steel-mill soda works doing with a court jester, a princess, and a castle on its label?

Picture a soda fountain counter in a booming Indiana steel town, the air thick with coal smoke and the clang of the mills down the road, and there on the shelf sits a bottle wrapped in a scene straight out of a storybook — a lady in a tall pointed headdress glancing back over her shoulder, a masked minstrel serenading her with a lute, castle towers rising against a crescent moon and a scatter of gold stars. It's a strange and wonderful bit of contrast, and it's exactly what makes this Sanitary Brand Root Beer label such a delight to hold today. Somebody at a bottling works in a gritty industrial pocket of Indiana decided their root beer deserved a bit of medieval romance, and nearly a century later, that decision still charms.

This is an original, unused New Old Stock (NOS) bottle label for Sanitary Brand Root Beer, produced for the Sanitary Bottling Works of 3824 Deodar Street, Indiana Harbor, Indiana, and printed by the Lehmann Printing & Lithograph Company of San Francisco — you'll find their imprint, "LEHMANN, S.F.," tucked at the bottom of the design.

The label measures 4.5 x 3.25 inches (about 11.4 x 8.3 cm) and belongs to the golden age of American chromolithography, its styling — the stylized blackletter-meets-Art-Deco lettering, the black-teal-and-gold palette, the short local telephone listing ("Telephone Indiana Harbor 1627") — placing it comfortably in the 1920s to 1930s.

The artwork itself is a small fantasy world unto itself: on the left, a court lady in teal and cream stands in a tall pointed hennin headdress trimmed in red, her powdered wig cascading past her shoulders; on the right, a masked jester-minstrel in a red-and-teal harlequin costume plucks a lute, framed by slender castle towers with gold-capped roofs; above them both, a gold crescent moon and a handful of tiny stars glitter against a deep black night sky.

In the center, a rounded tan panel outlined in metallic gold ink carries the brand name, the bottling works' address, and the "Contents 24 Fluid Ounces" statement in bold, confident lettering. It's a genuinely striking piece of small-format commercial art, printed with the metallic gold highlights that were the calling card of top-tier lithographers of the era.

🐴 The Company: Sanitary Bottling Works and Its Horse-Head Trademark

Sanitary Bottling Works of Indiana Harbor was a real, working regional soda bottler — not a name invented for a label, but a company whose embossed glass has turned up in the hands of bottle diggers and collectors for generations. Surviving bottles carry a horse's head as a trademark and the initials "S.B.W." embossed on the base, and at least one dealer has dated a Sanitary Bottling Works bottle bearing that same horse-head mark to the 1920s, which lines up neatly with the styling of this label. Collectors who've dug into the brand say Sanitary's shelf presence went beyond root beer — bottles survive bearing the Sanitary name on a "Koca Kola" and a lemon soda as well, suggesting a small multi-flavor operation typical of the independent bottling works that dotted industrial America before the big national soda brands consolidated the market.

The name itself, "Sanitary," wasn't chosen by accident. In the years following the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, "sanitary" was one of the most reassuring words a bottler could put on a label — a promise of clean processing and honest ingredients in an era when consumers had every reason to be wary of what went into a bottle.

Local legend and old research into the company's history holds a wrinkle worth passing down here: a period report is said to have named Sanitary Bottling Works among a group of local bottlers, bakeries, and groceries fined for sweetening their pop with benzoate of soda and saccharin instead of sugar — caught up, so the account goes, in the same wave of early Pure Food Act enforcement that saw federal chemist Harvey Wiley publicly campaigning against saccharin as an improper stand-in for real sugar.

The fine, as the story is told, came to a modest $110.50 — a small footnote in the national argument over what belonged in America's soda bottles, but a vivid one, with this very brand caught right in the middle of it. It's the kind of detail that never made the history books in a big way, but that collectors who've traced these old bottling works still like to pass along.

🖌️ The Printer: Lehmann Printing & Lithograph Co. of San Francisco

The small "LEHMANN, S.F." credit at the bottom of this label points to one of the major commercial lithography houses of the early 20th century. Founded in 1911, the Lehmann Printing & Lithograph Company of San Francisco grew into one of the largest label manufacturers in the world, running a permanent staff of in-house artists who hand-painted the illustrations, lettering, and full designs for its clients' products.

Original gouache artwork from the firm's design studio — dating from the 1920s into the 1930s and sized precisely to fit the bottle, jar, or can it was destined for — survives today in archival collections, giving us a rare window into exactly how a label like this one came to life: sketched, lettered, and colored by hand before it was ever set to press.

That a San Francisco lithographer's imprint ended up on a small bottling works' label clear across the country in Indiana Harbor isn't unusual at all — houses like Lehmann shipped both custom artwork and stock label designs to independent bottlers nationwide, competing for business with other California houses of the day.

It's a nice reminder that even the most local-feeling soda pop bottle often had its artwork traveling a very long road before it ever reached the shelf.

🏭 The Town: Indiana Harbor, East Chicago's Steel-Built Boomtown

Indiana Harbor was never a town in its own right — it's the industrial district of East Chicago, Indiana, lying east of the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal, distinct from "East Chicago proper" on the canal's west side. But locals have called it "The Harbor" as though it were its own place since its founding in 1901, and for good reason: it grew up practically overnight. Historian Archibald McKinlay put it best, describing how Indiana Harbor "went up like a Hollywood set" in those earliest years — a planned industrial district built fast and built big. The turning point came in 1903, when Inland Steel arrived and transformed what had been a population of just over 3,400 people at the 1900 census into one of the great industrial powerhouses of the Calumet region. By the First World War, East Chicago had earned itself two proud nicknames still remembered locally today: the "Arsenal of America," and, as one South Shore Railroad poster of the day proclaimed, the "Workshop of America."

That's the world this little root beer label was born into — a fast-growing, immigrant-heavy, working-class mill district, its streets full of steelworkers and their families who needed somewhere close to home to get a cold soda after a shift. Sanitary Bottling Works' address on Deodar Street placed it right in the thick of that neighborhood, a street that still runs through the Indiana Harbor section of East Chicago today. Old-timers from the district have long spoken of Indiana Harbor's soda fountains and corner stores as gathering places every bit as important as the taverns and union halls — a small daily luxury in a town built around heavy, unrelenting industrial work.

👥 The People Behind the Label

Here's an honest gap worth naming rather than glossing over: no owner's name, no bottler, no company officer for Sanitary Bottling Works survives clearly in the public record today. What we do know is told through the objects themselves — the embossed horse-head bottles, the "S.B.W." monogram, and labels exactly like this one, discovered years apart by different collectors who've each pieced together a little more of the story. Much of what's known about this company has, by all accounts, come from collectors and researchers digging through old bottles and scraps of local memory rather than from any surviving company ledger — the kind of grassroots history that gets passed down in bottle-collecting circles and rarely makes it into a formal archive. The Lehmann artists who painted this jester-and-princess scene are equally anonymous, workers in a busy San Francisco design studio turning out label after label for clients across the country, most of them never signing their names to the beautiful little worlds they created.

🌟 Why This Little Label Still Matters Today

Small regional bottlers like Sanitary Bottling Works came and went by the dozens in the first decades of the 20th century, most leaving behind nothing more than a broken bottle in a dig site or, if a family saved a stack of unused labels, a handful of paper survivors like this one. That makes surviving, unused labels from companies like this genuinely scarce — a real piece of a steel town's daily commercial life, printed by a top-tier lithography house, from a company whose full story is still being pieced together one bottle and one label at a time. For collectors of root beer and soda advertising, for Indiana and Calumet-region history enthusiasts, and for anyone who loves the fanciful, storybook style so many soda and candy makers leaned on in the early 20th century to make their product feel a little magical, this label sits right at that crossroads — equal parts small-town industrial history and pure whimsical artistry.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🖼️ Framed on its own with a simple mat to let the gold metallic borders and jester-and-princess artwork take center stage
• 🍺 Grouped in a shadow box alongside old bottle caps, stoneware, or root beer memorabilia for a soda fountain vignette
• 🏰 Paired with other fantasy-themed advertising art for a wall dedicated to storybook and medieval commercial illustration
• 🏭 Displayed alongside Indiana Harbor / East Chicago photographs or postcards for a regional industrial-history corner
• 🎨 Used as a design reference piece for anyone studying early 20th-century lithography and hand-lettered typography
• 🛋️ Set on a small easel on a bar cart, kitchen shelf, or game room bookshelf where its colors can catch the light

🎁 Who Collects These

This label draws in several kinds of collectors at once: soda and root beer advertising specialists chasing regional brands beyond the big names; Indiana and Calumet-region historians tracking the industrial rise of East Chicago and Indiana Harbor; bottle diggers who already know the Sanitary name from the horse-head trademark and want the paper to go with the glass; and lovers of early advertising art drawn purely to the fantasy imagery — the jester, the princess, the castle under a crescent moon — regardless of what brand it happens to be selling. It's equally at home in a themed advertising collection or standing entirely on its own as a small, beautifully printed piece of Americana.

❓ FAQ

Is this an original label or a reproduction?

This is an original, unused (New Old Stock) label produced for the Sanitary Bottling Works of Indiana Harbor, Indiana, printed by the Lehmann Printing & Lithograph Company of San Francisco.

What does "New Old Stock" mean here?

It means the label was printed for use but never applied to a bottle — it's an original survivor from the bottling works' supply, not a later copy or reprint.

How old is this label?

The styling — its blackletter-and-Art-Deco lettering, its color palette, and the short local telephone listing format — places it in the 1920s to 1930s, the same general window in which the Lehmann company's known label artwork was produced.

What size is the label?

It measures 4.5 x 3.25 inches (about 11.4 x 8.3 cm).

What is Sanitary Bottling Works, and where was it located?

It was a regional soda bottler operating out of 3824 Deodar Street in Indiana Harbor, a working-class industrial district of East Chicago, Indiana, known for a horse-head trademark and "S.B.W." monogram found on its embossed bottles.

What's the story behind the jester-and-princess artwork?

It's a fanciful, storybook scene — a court lady in a tall pointed headdress and a masked minstrel playing a lute, set against castle towers and a crescent moon — the kind of whimsical imagery early 20th-century lithographers often used to give an ordinary bottle of pop a bit of magic.

Who printed the label?

The Lehmann Printing & Lithograph Company of San Francisco, a major early 20th-century label manufacturer whose in-house artists hand-painted illustrations and lettering for bottlers across the country.