Antique Brick's Nonpareil Mince Meat Label 🦁 5 LB SIZE, Edgar Brick & Sons Crosswicks NJ, NOS 1930s

How Did America's Biggest Mince Meat Maker End Up in a Little Quaker Town? 🥧 An Antique Brick's Nonpareil Mince Meat 5 lb. Label, Edgar Brick & Sons, Crosswicks, N.J.

Size: 3" x 2 1/4"

It's a pleasure to look at. The label has rounded corners, an olive-gold border and a thin yellow rule just inside it, all on cream paper. BRICK'S sits across the top in big red letters edged in gold, NONPAREIL is tucked under it, and a tiny crest with a yellow ribbon comes next. Then MINCE MEAT in heavy navy, and CONSISTENTLY SUPERIOR SINCE 1874 in red. The small print lists what went in the can: apples, sugar, raisins, currants, beef, peel, spices, salt, cane syrup, brandy and benzoate of soda at 1/10 of 1%. It tells the cook to add 1/4 cup of water per pound. The bottom line reads EDGAR BRICK & SONS, CROSSWICKS, N.J. (MANUFACTURER), NET WEIGHT 5 LBS. Nonpareil means "without equal." This is new old stock, printed and put away and never put on a can, and the back is blank paper with the front lettering showing through in mirror image.

🥧 Edgar Brick and his mince meat

In the 1850s Edgar Brick and his wife Susan settled in Crosswicks, where he ran a general store on Main Street. The mince meat on his shelves came from Philadelphia and didn't suit him, so in 1874 he began making his own. The first year's batch came to 76 pounds. Within about five years he'd outgrown his little operation. He bought two local farmhouses, moved them to the factory site and joined them into one building, and by 1879 he had a factory. By 1900 or so the firm, still under his name alone, was the biggest mince meat maker in New Jersey. Nonpareil was already one of its brands: a 1912 Michigan food report lists "Bricks Nonpariel Bulk Mince Meat manufactured by Edgar Brick, Crosswicks, N.J."

When Edgar died in 1920, his sons Arthur, Josiah and Charles took over, and the family ran the company for 48 more years. In World War II the plant had 40 workers turning out three million pounds of mince meat a year, the biggest mince meat maker in the whole country. And the Bricks did plenty for the village besides. They helped bring electricity to Crosswicks, built a mill and an ice plant along Crosswicks Creek, and formed the Chesterfield Township Historical Society.

That Society keeps some of what's left of the company. There's Brick's own Nonpareil printing block, the chopping block Edgar used for his first mince meat, and a spice bucket from the factory, wood painted green. The catalog card on the bucket says it still smells of spices. Which brings me to the local legend. Every fall, when the factory was in full swing, they say the whole village smelled of mince meat, fruit and suet with nutmeg and cloves in the air. And on October 18, 2014, at the Society's Heritage Day in Crosswicks, the program listed mincemeat sampling and sale from a recipe "based on authentic Brick's Mincemeat Recipe."

📖 How the story ended

Mince meat sales slipped through the 1960s. By 1968 Brick's had stopped making it and moved on to alcoholic beverages. The doors closed in 1979, and a lot of the old equipment and furnishings went to auction. The Hamilton Uniform Company bought the building in 1980. In 2017 Preservation New Jersey named the old factory among the state's most endangered historic places.

Nonpareil was just one of Brick's names. Other Brick's labels carry the names Old Homestead, Banquet Hall, Beechwood and Buyers Special. A bookseller in Princeton, New Jersey once listed a lot of about 100 unused Edgar Brick labels, with more than 50 Nonpareils among them, and called the lot "undated but ca. 1920s?"

🎄 About mince meat

Mince meat is an English pie filling, and yes, it had beef in it. The label says so. Settlers carried it to the New England colonies, where Thanksgiving tables had it by the 1600s, and mince pie was even called America's national dish until the 1940s, when apple pie moved in. Prohibition added a funny chapter. The alcohol ban didn't cover food, and some tinned mince meat of that time ran over 14 percent alcohol.

🏡 Crosswicks

Crosswicks is a village in Chesterfield Township, Burlington County. The first Quaker settlers came to the creek in 1677, and Crosswicks takes its name from Crossweeksung, a Lenape word. The Friends meeting house, a brick building begun in 1773 and modeled on the Buckingham Meeting House in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is a landmark all by itself. Troops from both armies used it in the Revolution. A skirmish in the village on June 23, 1778, just five days ahead of the Battle of Monmouth, sent three cannonballs into the meeting house. One was kept, and it was later set back in the north wall with mortar, right where it struck, on the second floor.

Years before that, the colonial court in Trenton called two councils at the meeting house, in 1756 and 1758, to decide the future of the Lenape. The Lenape had insisted on Crosswicks, where they'd lived on good terms with the Quakers. At the last council the first reservation was created, in what is now Shamong Township. And in 1775 a petition went from Chesterfield residents, Quakers leading the way, to the New Jersey legislature, the first one asking for slavery to be abolished.

📅 How old is it?

The only year printed on the label is the 1874 in the slogan. I have these in the 1930s, and two things on the label put them there. The maker's line reads EDGAR BRICK & SONS, and in the 1910s the same Nonpareil was "manufactured by Edgar Brick"; the "& Sons" is in the trade papers by 1925, after Edgar's death in 1920. And the label names brandy with no alcohol figure and no Prohibition permit number, which Brick's own labels from the dry years carry - the Banquet Hall can label prints "Proof Alcohol by Volume 14 Per Cent" and permit N.J. H-926 - so this one comes after Repeal in December 1933. The benzoate line fits. A federal ruling in 1909 allowed benzoate of soda in food at 1/10 of 1% if the label said so, and Brick's label says so. The bookseller who had the big lot of Brick's labels put them around the 1920s.

📷 About the history photos

The final three pictures are history only, not part of what you're buying. They show the Society's Nonpareil printing block, Edgar's first chopping block and the factory spice bucket. What you get is the label.

Every one of mine is unused. It looks great framed in a kitchen or pantry, on a New Jersey history wall, or for anybody whose grandmother swore by Brick's at Christmas. The supply is finite. Brick's closed in 1979 and nobody is printing these again, so once the limited supply for sale is gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.