Antique 1920s Victory Cigar Label 🏛️ Embossed Roman Gladiator NOS W.C. Frutiger & Co.

Who Made Victory Cigars in Red Lion? 🏛️ Antique Victory Cigar Box Label — Embossed Gladiator Scene — W.C. Frutiger, Red Lion, PA

Size: 9" x 6 1/2"

A gladiator, shield up, stands in a packed arena while the crowd looks down from the stands - and right across the top, in big white script on a red scroll, one word: Victory. This is the inner-lid label for W. C. Frutiger & Co.'s Victory cigars from Red Lion, Pennsylvania, with a gold crowned-helm crest embossed up in the corner, and the same sheet still carries its matching Victory strip label below, the one that ran along the edge of the box, flanked by two more gold crests and laurel. In tiny type at the foot it reads TITLE & DESIGN OWNED BY W. C. FRUTIGER & CO. - the brand and the picture were his, and no other factory could use them. Every one I have is unused, the main label and its strip still joined.

🎖️ A brand for two wars

William Christian Frutiger - W.C., as he liked to be called - got into the cigar business around 1900 in Red Lion, and his Factory 417 made cigars from 1920 to 1967, first by hand and later by machine, about fifteen brands in all: Bank Note, Big Wolf, Hambone, Sun Maid, Banker's Bouquet, El Garcia and Victory among them. His grandson Bob told the story to Chip Brooks of The Cigar Label Gazette in 1999: W.C. created Victory during World War I, when every town in the country wanted something it could call patriotic, and production slowed after the war. Collector tradition holds the arena scene was picked on purpose - a gladiator's triumph for a cigar called Victory in the years after 1917 - and collectors who know Roman imagery read that raised arm in the viewing box at the left as the emperor's nod to the winner.

W.C. had a habit that explains a lot about labels like this one. As Bob told it, he bought about a ten-year supply at a time - for a label that sold well, 95 bundles of 500 - and if business was slow, ten years' worth could easily stretch to twenty. If he ran short for a customer, he'd buy another factory's labels to fill the order. So when World War II came and the country wanted that word again, the family started making Victory cigars again - in the labels left over from the first war. After World War II the brand lost its pull and was dropped.

The factory went on into the machine age. In 1950 it switched from hand-rolled to machine-made and made just one shape, a panatela, and in the '50s and '60s six machines turned out 5,000 cigars a day apiece - 30,000 a day with ten people, where it had taken 135 in the '20s and '30s. Factory 417 closed shortly after W.C. died in 1967, and the building and everything in it went at auction for $7,200. The old site is a parking lot now - local memory puts it under the old Kaltreider Memorial Library's lot.

🏭 Red Lion, the cigar town

Red Lion was settled in 1852 and named for an old tavern, and by 1927 it had 109 cigar factories and was making about a fifth of all the nickel cigars sold in America. A lot of that work was done at kitchen tables, families carrying leaf home at night to strip it and bringing it back in the morning. Old-timers liked to brag that the town once turned out ten percent of all the cigars sold in the country, and the story holds that Red Lion's opera house was built on cigar money - the kind of tale that tells you how big the trade was in one picture. Machines changed all of it: a cigar machine could make 6,000 a day to a hand roller's 600, and in a bitter 1934 strike, women lay down across a factory driveway to keep the trucks out. Red Lion never forgot - for years the town rang in the New Year by raising a giant cigar.

🖨️ The printing

The lithographer's line in tiny type under the strip reads CONSOLIDATED LITHOGRAPHING CORPORATION, BROOKLYN, N.Y. - the same house that printed Frutiger's Sun Maid label, and one of the biggest label printers in the country. That's the line that dates it, because the firm only took that name on January 1, 1926. Put that with the dealers who carry the same design and call it 1920s, and this is a late-1920s Victory, printed in the years after the first war when Bob says production had slowed. It's the real thing: color laid down one pass at a time, then the gold pressed up off the paper by the embossing die.

The tobacciana world has its own lore about where labels like this come from - that the big finds were the clear-outs of old cigar factory stock in the 1970s and 1980s, whole runs found stacked just as they were left when a factory wound down. With a maker who bought ten years of labels at a time, it's easy to believe.

🏛️ About these

They're 9 by 6 1/2 inches, label and strip together. Frame it for a den or a cigar room, hang it with other Red Lion and York County labels, or give it to somebody with Pennsylvania roots. Nobody's printing Frutiger's Victory labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.