Antique Watchman Cigar Box Label 🐕 Schnauzer Portrait, Gold Embossed Inner Lid Label, Milwaukee NOS

Would This Schnauzer Really Guard Your Cigars? 🐕 Antique Watchman Cigar Box Inner Label, Milwaukee

Size: 7" x 5"

WATCHMAN, in big red letters outlined in gold, over a dog that doesn't seem like much of a guard dog at all. He'd probably lick you till you ran away. This is the inner label for the Watchman cigar brand, the one a smoker saw when he lifted the lid of the box, and it's a beauty: a soft gray portrait of a wire-coated Schnauzer, ears up and whiskers out, in a raised gold beaded frame with gold scrollwork on either side. My pictures seriously don't do it justice.

🐕 "Bred in Milwaukee"

The inner label doesn't print a maker's name, but the outside label for the same brand carries the very same dog along with "Manufactured by M.A.C. Cigar Co.," "Celestino Fernandez & Co." and, best of all, "Bred in Milwaukee." Somebody at that cigar company had a sense of humor.

It fits, too. A Schnauzer is about as German as a dog gets. The breed came off the farms of Bavaria and Württemberg, where it earned its keep catching rats and guarding the yard, it was first shown in Germany as the wire-haired pinscher in 1879, and the American Kennel Club recognized it in 1904. And Milwaukee was about as German as an American city got. German families were arriving by the thousand in the 1840s, more than a third of the city was German by the 1850s, and by the 1860s people were calling it the "German Athens of America." A city like that smoked a lot of cigars, and Milwaukee was one of the country's cigar-making centers right alongside Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit and Buffalo.

🏷️ An Inner Label

A cigar box carried more than one label. The outer label went on the outside, where the store clerk and the customer saw it, and the inner label was glued up inside the lid, so it was the first thing you saw when the box opened. This one never made it onto a box. These had to be done on heavy paper stock, which makes them stay vibrant and new-looking for a long time, and the gold on this one is raised right up off the sheet.

There's a local legend about where labels like this come from. The story goes that Milwaukee's smaller cigar makers kept their overstock labels in the back rooms and attics of the tobacco warehouses along the Menomonee River, and that when those buildings were converted decades later, flat files full of never-used labels came back out into the daylight. Clean, flat and never glued, just like this one.

🎨 The Art

Cigar labels show you what vintage advertising is all about, with the beautiful graphics that lithography provides that modern printing can't reproduce. It was a lost art after the 1920s, unfortunately. Most of these artists were very good but desperate for work during that era. They got paid very little and received no recognition for their work. The majority of these artists will remain unknown, but we can keep their art alive forever.

The big label houses of the day were mostly German-run New York shops, and the best known was George Schlegel Lithographing Co., run by four generations of men named George Schlegel from 1849 to 1957. Their carefully cataloged label collection is at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware today. This inner label doesn't carry a printer's name, so whoever printed it stays one of those unknowns.

📅 How Old Is It?

No date is printed on the label. It comes from the 1900s to the 1920s, the stretch when cigar box art like this was at its best.

🔍 Condition

New old stock, never glued into a box, with bright color and crisp gold. Little to no wear.

🖼️ Display Ideas

Imagine hanging this 100-year-old antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room. It's a natural for a Schnauzer lover, a cigar room or den, or a wall of old Milwaukee and Wisconsin advertising, and at 7" x 5" it frames up nicely in a standard frame with a mat.