Antique Blackhawk Ginger Ale Label 🪓 Carse & Ohlweiler Co. Rock Island, Ill. Color Litho Embossed Native American Chief

Could You Hold a Piece of Rock Island's Most Famous Brand in the Palm of Your Hand? 🪓

There is something genuinely magical about holding a piece of original American advertising art — not a reproduction, not a poster print, not a scan mounted behind glass, but the actual thing. This antique Blackhawk Ginger Ale bottle label is exactly that: a small, vivid, color-lithographed rectangle measuring just 3¼" × 2½" that once traveled from a Rock Island, Illinois bottling house to a retailer's shelf, wrapped around a 5½-ounce bottle of one of the Midwest's most celebrated regional sodas. It is New Old Stock (NOS) — a surviving unissued example from the original print run, never applied to a bottle — and it represents one of the rarer small-format Blackhawk label configurations known to collectors. The 5½-ounce capacity is an unusually specific and oddly charming size, and the label that dressed that bottle is every bit as specific and charming in return.

The label is printed in a bold five-color palette of red, green, black, white, and silver, and it carries embossing that gives the design genuine tactile depth — you can feel the lettering and the portrait under your fingertips. Dominating the left side is a bust portrait of Chief Black Hawk of the Sauk nation, rendered with real dignity inside an oval medallion hung on a beaded chain, a tomahawk motif flanking the brand name to the right. The text reads, in full: CAPACITY 5½ FLUID OUNCES / BLACKHAWK / GINGER ALE / CARSE & OHLWEILER CO. / ROCK ISLAND, ILL. / NONE GENUINE WITHOUT OUR TRADE MARK & SIGNATURE. At the bottom, the cursive signature of Carse & Ohlweiler is printed as the company's anti-counterfeiting guarantee — proof that even in this era, a popular regional brand inspired imitation. This is an excellent, early example of American advertising art and Midwest commercial lithography at its most confident.

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🏭 Carse & Ohlweiler Co. — The Company Behind the Brand

The story of this label begins with an Irishman who crossed the Atlantic with his parents as a boy and eventually made his way to the banks of the Mississippi. Henry Carse was born near the city of Belfast and came to America in 1848 with his parents, John and Mary Carse, who settled in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh in the mid-nineteenth century was a serious bottling town — carbonated water was a commercial product long before the great soda brands of the twentieth century, and Carse learned the trade there from the ground up. By 1868 he had relocated to Rock Island, Illinois, bringing with him the skills, the ambition, and the Pittsburgh know-how that would eventually make the Blackhawk name famous across the region.

In 1872, John Ohlweiler joined him in the bottling business, and the partnership that would carry the Blackhawk brand through its golden age was formed. They operated for decades as Rock Island Bottling Works, Carse & Ohlweiler, Proprietors — you can find that name marked on an 1889 industrial map of Rock Island among the city's notable manufacturing concerns. In 1902, the firm was formally incorporated under the name Carse & Ohlweiler Company, the name that appears on this very label.

Henry Carse was not merely a businessman — he was an inventor. He held patents on at least three bottling-industry devices: an economical air valve for releasing air from bottles during filling; a safety screen placed around bottles during the filling process to prevent breakage and protect workers (a device that was taken up and manufactured at scale by the house of John Matthews of New York, one of the most prominent carbonation-equipment firms in the country); and a continuous operator perfected in 1892 and sold to the Hartt Manufacturing Company of Chicago for broader manufacture. These were not trivial gadgets — they were production-floor solutions that spread through the bottling industry, and they tell you something about the caliber of mind running this Rock Island operation.

Carse also served as Mayor of Rock Island, holding the office from 1880 to 1883, and he made several subsequent bids for the position — in 1883, 1887, 1897, and 1909 — though he did not return to the chair. He died in 1915. His longtime partner John Ohlweiler had predeceased him in 1914, ending a collaboration that had spanned more than forty years. The company they built, however, did not end with them.

The second generation stepped forward seamlessly. William R. Carse, born in Rock Island on July 20, 1882, had grown up in the bottling works — practically raised among the bottles, the hissing carbonation equipment, and the stacks of paper labels. After completing his education at Brown's Business College, he took on the presidency in 1915. John Ohlweiler, Jr. served as secretary-treasurer and office manager. E. A. Applequist — who had married one of Henry Carse's five daughters — became vice president and sales manager, bringing the family circle tight around the enterprise. By all accounts they carried the brand's reputation forward with the same civic pride and regional ambition their fathers had established.

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🏙️ Rock Island, Illinois — The City on the Mississippi

Rock Island sits at one of the most historically loaded bends of the upper Mississippi River, directly across from Davenport, Iowa, in the heart of what is known as the Quad Cities. It is a place shaped by water, by rail, by war, and by industry — and Carse & Ohlweiler fit naturally into that industrial fabric. The city had been a significant manufacturing and transportation hub since the mid-1800s, and the bottling works that Henry Carse established in 1868 grew alongside that broader commercial expansion. The Rock River, which flows into the Mississippi just north of Rock Island, was the heart of the territory that gave this very brand its name — because it was along that river that the Sauk leader Black Hawk had made his last stand.

There is a special resonance in the fact that a Rock Island company chose Black Hawk as its brand identity. This was not a distant appropriation of a generic "Indian brand" the way some bottlers used Native imagery with no local connection. Carse & Ohlweiler were bottling in the very landscape Black Hawk had fought to preserve. The Rock River valley was his country. Naming your most famous product after him, in that place, carried genuine regional meaning — the kind of pride a local audience would recognize and respond to.

Augustana College, one of Rock Island's landmark institutions, holds a manuscript research file on the company — "Carse and Ohlweiler Company, Rock Island, Illinois, 1916," cataloged as MSS 385 in the Augustana College Special Collections local history archive. That a college thought this company worth preserving in its historical archive tells you something about the firm's standing in the community.

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🪶 Chief Black Hawk — The Name Behind the Brand

The portrait on this label is not decorative filler. It depicts one of the most consequential Native American leaders in the history of the upper Midwest, and his story is inseparable from the soil this company stood on.

Black Hawk — born Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak in 1767 — was a war leader of the Sauk people, a nation whose traditional territory spanned what is now northern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin. In 1804, a disputed treaty (the Treaty of St. Louis) ceded approximately fifty million acres of Sauk and Fox land to the United States, a cession that Black Hawk and his followers refused to recognize as legitimate. When the U.S. government pressed the Sauk to remove to Iowa, Black Hawk led a faction — including Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, and Ho-Chunk people — back across the Mississippi into Illinois in 1832 to reoccupy their ancestral village at Saukenuk, near the mouth of the Rock River. The short, brutal campaign that followed became known as the Black Hawk War of 1832.

The war ended in catastrophe for Black Hawk's people at the Battle of Bad Axe, where men, women, and children were slaughtered as they attempted to cross back across the Mississippi. Black Hawk himself was captured shortly after and, remarkably, was not executed — instead, he was taken on a tour of eastern cities, paraded before crowds in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston as a kind of living exhibit of the conquered frontier. He met President Andrew Jackson. He was a sensation.

But Black Hawk refused to be merely a curiosity. He told his story — his whole story — to a government interpreter named Antoine LeClair, and the resulting autobiography, Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak or Black Hawk, published in 1833, became an immediate bestseller. It was one of the first Native American autobiographies published in America, and it was extraordinary: articulate, proud, politically sharp, deeply human. It has never gone out of print. It has been revised, reprinted, and re-examined by scholars for nearly two centuries, and it remains assigned reading in American history and Native American studies courses to this day. The man on this label was not just a regional symbol — he was a figure of genuine national and literary significance.

The seller notes something worth keeping: the Chicago Blackhawks hockey franchise, founded in 1926, also took their name and their original Indian-head logo from this same historical figure. Their first owner, Frederic McLaughlin, had commanded a U.S. Army division during World War I nicknamed the "Blackhawk Division" after the Sauk leader — and he brought that name to the NHL. So the same Sauk chief whose portrait appears on this Rock Island ginger ale label is also the spiritual ancestor of one of the Original Six NHL franchises. That is not a small piece of American cultural history for a 3¼" × 2½" paper label to carry.

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🏆 The Award, the Cider, and What We Wish We Could Try

In 1905, Blackhawk Ginger Ale — made under the formula developed by Henry Carse himself — was awarded first prize for quality at a major industrial exhibition held in England. That a Rock Island regional beverage was entering and winning international competitions in the Edwardian era speaks to the genuine seriousness with which the Carse family approached their craft. This was not a local popularity contest. Somebody shipped Blackhawk Ginger Ale across the Atlantic and it came back with a prize.

Beyond ginger ale, the company produced a full range of Blackhawk beverages: Root Beer, Orange Cider, Lemon Soda, Lime Rickey, and various sizes and formulations of ginger ale. Collector lore passed down among those who specialize in Quad Cities breweriana and soda advertising holds that the Blackhawk apple cider was particularly well regarded — amazing cider, as the seller puts it, though like so much of what made regional American food and drink special in this era, that recipe is long gone. Too bad, as the seller rightly says, that they have been gone for over eighty years, because a taste of that cider or that prize-winning ginger ale would be something worth having.

The company was also a Dr Pepper bottler at some point in its history, and by 1946 appears on a Nesbitt's franchise bottler list, with E. A. Applequist listed at 425 - 11th Street, Rock Island. A 1951 collector reference places the firm as a Blackhawk Brands (Orange Crush Product) franchisee. The company clearly adapted, took on national brand franchises, and kept pace with the mid-century bottling industry even as the original Blackhawk proprietary beverages gave way to bigger national names.

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🖨️ The Label Itself — Color Lithography at Its Finest

Before the age of digital printing, before offset presses made color reproduction cheap and uniform, commercial paper labels like this one were produced through color lithography — a process that required skilled artisans to prepare separate stones or plates for each color, then align them with precision through multiple press runs. The result, when done well, was richer, more layered, and more tactile than anything a modern press produces at the same scale. The five colors on this label — red, green, black, white, and silver — were each laid down separately, and the embossing that gives the design its three-dimensional quality required an additional die-pressing step. The combination of chromolithography and embossing was a hallmark of quality label production in the early-to-mid twentieth century, reserved for brands that wanted their bottle to stand out on a shelf or in a cooler.

The design itself rewards close looking. The beaded chain framing the Chief Black Hawk portrait, the crossed tomahawks flanking the brand name, the careful rendering of his face and his red shirt — these are the work of a professional commercial artist and a skilled printing house, even if the name of that lithographer has not survived in the documented record. Whatever firm printed these labels, they knew their craft.

This particular label — the 5½-ounce format — is the rarer of the known Blackhawk ginger ale label configurations. The 8-ounce and 12-ounce "Standard" sizes are more commonly encountered in the collector market. The 5½-ounce bottle was a genuinely odd, specific size — not a standard trade format — and the label made to fit it is correspondingly harder to find. That specificity is part of what makes it interesting.

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🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🗺️ Framed in a Quad Cities or Rock Island, Illinois history display — pair it with a period map of Rock Island, a postcard of the Mississippi riverfront, or a photograph of the Carse & Ohlweiler bottling works for a genuinely layered piece of local history.
• 🪶 In a Black Hawk / Sauk Nation historical collection — alongside reproductions of the 1833 autobiography, portraits of the chief, or other Black Hawk War-era artifacts, this label becomes a document of how his legacy was memorialized in commercial culture.
• 🍺 In a vintage soda and breweriana display — grouped with other antique soda labels, early American bottling equipment, or vintage advertising trade cards, it holds its own beautifully as a premium piece of pre-Prohibition and mid-century American beverage history.
• 🏒 In a Chicago Blackhawks hockey memorabilia room — the shared origin story of the brand name and the franchise makes this label a genuinely unexpected and conversation-starting addition to any hockey collector's display.
• 🎨 Displayed solo in a small float frame — the five-color lithography and embossing make this label strong enough to stand alone as a piece of commercial graphic art; a simple archival float mount lets the embossing cast its own shadow and the colors speak for themselves.
• 🏠 In a kitchen, bar room, or study with Midwest Americana décor — original antique advertising art grounds a room in a way that reproduction prints simply cannot, and at 3¼" × 2½" this label fits in spaces where larger pieces wouldn't.

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🎁 Who Collects These

Antique soda and beverage labels occupy a passionate corner of American advertising collectibles, and Blackhawk pieces in particular draw from several overlapping collector communities. Breweriana and soda advertising collectors prize early regional brands over national ones — the Blackhawk name has the added weight of genuine historical iconography, real company history, and documented rarity in its smaller formats. Native American history and Black Hawk War enthusiasts are drawn to this label because it is a primary-era commercial artifact bearing the chief's portrait — not a reproduction, not a later tribute, but an actual object from a company that operated in his homeland. Rock Island and Quad Cities local historians recognize Carse & Ohlweiler as one of their city's genuinely notable industrial firms, and original paper ephemera from the company is increasingly hard to find. Chicago Blackhawks collectors, as noted, often discover that this label connects directly to the origin story of their franchise's name.

And American commercial art and lithography collectors value the label for its printing craft alone — a five-color embossed chromolithograph at this scale is exactly the kind of object that was produced with genuine skill and has survived in genuine scarcity.

The seller makes a point worth repeating: many of the Blackhawk advertising images circulating today are reproductions — poster prints and digital enlargements selling for hundreds of dollars. The original antique label is the thing that only appreciates, the thing that carries the actual history in its paper and ink rather than representing it from a distance. This is that original antique.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the exact age of this label?
A: The label carries the corporate name "Carse & Ohlweiler Co.," which the firm adopted in 1902 when it incorporated. The company was active and producing Blackhawk labels well into the mid-twentieth century. Comparable Blackhawk ginger ale labels are dated by dealers and reference listings across a range spanning roughly the early 1910s through the 1940s. No manufacture date is printed or marked on this label, and I won't claim a single year I cannot prove — but the graphic style, the embossing technique, and the label format are all consistent with early-to-mid twentieth-century American commercial lithography. That is the honest, defensible range.

Q: Is this a reproduction or a print?
A: This is an original antique paper label — New Old Stock (NOS), meaning it was printed as a production label intended for bottling use and survived unissued. The back of the label (visible in the photographs) shows the embossing pressed through to the reverse — something no poster reproduction replicates. The paper, the embossing, and the lithographic ink are all period-original. Many Blackhawk advertising images circulate today as reproduction poster prints; this is not one of them.

Q: Why is the 5½-ounce size considered rarer?
A: The documented Blackhawk ginger ale label formats include 5½-ounce, 8-ounce, and 12-ounce "Standard" sizes. The 8-ounce and Standard formats appear more frequently in collector listings and dealer inventories. The 5½-ounce was a non-standard bottle size to begin with — unusual enough that it stands out even among bottling-era formats — and labels produced for a smaller-run bottle size naturally survive in smaller quantities.

Q: Who was Black Hawk, and why did the company name their brand after him?
A: Black Hawk (Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, 1767–1838) was a Sauk war leader whose last stand took place along the Rock River in northern Illinois — the same regional landscape where Carse & Ohlweiler operated in Rock Island. The Black Hawk War of 1832 was fought on this ground. Naming the brand after him was a genuine act of regional identity, not a generic "Indian brand" appropriation — this was the local hero, the local history, the local soil. His 1833 autobiography remains in print and in academic use nearly two centuries later. He is one of the most documented and studied Native American figures in American history.

Q: Does the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team share this same origin?
A: Yes — the NHL's Chicago Blackhawks, founded in 1926, took their name from the same historical figure. The team's first owner, Frederic McLaughlin, had commanded the U.S. Army's "Blackhawk Division" during World War I, a unit named for the Sauk leader. The shared namesake makes this label a genuinely unexpected conversation piece for hockey memorabilia collectors.

Q: What happened to Carse & Ohlweiler Company?
A: The company was active at least into the late 1940s — documented on a 1946 Nesbitt's franchise bottler list and a 1951 Orange Crush franchise reference — having adapted over the decades to bottle national brands alongside its own Blackhawk line. The exact date the company ceased operations has not been established in the sources I have reviewed, though the seller's note that they have been gone for over eighty years places the closure no later than the mid-twentieth century. What is certain is that original paper labels from their production are now genuinely scarce artifacts of a Rock Island business that operated for the better part of a century.

Q: Is this suitable for framing and display?
A: Absolutely — and it is worth doing properly. At 3¼" × 2½", the label is intimate in scale but bold in color and design. An archival float frame that allows the embossing to cast a slight shadow is ideal. The five-color lithography holds up beautifully at close range, and the Chief Black Hawk portrait has the kind of dignity and graphic presence that rewards being seen rather than stored. Original antique advertising art of this quality belongs on a wall where it can be appreciated, not in a drawer where the history disappears with it.