Vintage 1950s Brown Stone Corona Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Rare, Cool History

Who Made Brown Stone Corona Cigars? 🚬 Vintage 1950s Brown Stone Corona Embossed Cigar Label

Size: 7" x 6 3/4" ~ Unused, never applied to a box.

🏷️ What's On It

BROWN STONE arches across the top in deep brown serif capitals edged in gold, CORONA beneath it. Center stage: a squared block of brownstone in three-quarter view, BROWN and STONE lettered in raised white on its two visible faces, and resting on top a gold mallet and chisel - a stonecutter's own tools, left on the job. Lower left: 100% IMPORTED HAVANA FILLER. Lower right, in script: John A. Uhl, and below it, CIGAR COMPANY INCORPORATED. Price marks - 15¢ / 2 for 25¢ - sit at three of the four corners, and BROWN STONE CORONA repeats twice more along the bottom band. Tucked into the very bottom edge, small: CONSOLIDATED LITHO. CORP., CARLE PLACE, L.I., N.Y. The reverse is blank, the whole design pressed through in relief - never used. A hard one to find.

🪨 A Brownstone Brand

That block on the label isn't generic packaging art - it's the brand's whole name, drawn literally. Brown Stone was a Connecticut cigar name before Uhl ever used it: a Shepard & Co. letterhead from Portland, Connecticut, dated 1898, reads "WE MAKE THE BROWN STONE CIGAR." Portland is Connecticut's brownstone town - the Portland Brownstone Quarries were cut from 1690, worked commercially from 1783, and at their 19th-century peak employed more than 1,500 men, shipping stone on the quarry's own boats to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Chicago, New Haven and Hartford, before a 1936 flood and the 1938 hurricane finally drowned the pits for good. However Uhl came by a name that already meant something in Connecticut cigar country, the mallet and chisel on a quarried block make the meaning plain.

🚬 John A. Uhl Cigar Company

Uhl was a real, working Connecticut cigar maker, based at Montowese, in the town of North Haven, Connecticut. The company shows up in the trade press as far back as 1907, when Tobacco Leaf recorded "Montowese, Conn. - John A. Uhl, cigar[s]," and again as a union-label shop in a 1911 New England label conference listing. By 1944 it had become the John A. Uhl Cigar Co., Inc. - officers Louis E. Uhl as president and John P. Uhl as secretary and treasurer, both of nearby Branford - which is exactly what CIGAR COMPANY INCORPORATED on this label is telling you. The company was still listed decades later, into the 2000s, at 8 Moulthrop Street in North Haven, making cigars under its own name and a second brand, Summerdale.

🖨️ Consolidated Litho. Corp. and the Date

Consolidated Lithographing Corporation took its name on January 1, 1926 under Jacob A. Voice, merging in Wm. Steiner & Sons Lithographers. Its early work is imprinted Brooklyn; the Carle Place, Long Island plant named at the bottom of this label was new construction, built in 1951. That plant sets the floor for this label's date. The ceiling comes from the label's own words: "100% Imported Havana Filler" was a claim any American cigar maker could still legally make right up until the U.S. trade embargo that followed the 1959 Cuban revolution took effect in February 1962. So these are 1950s labels, printed between the new plant and the embargo.

I like that Havana line. Back in the early 1900s most American cigar makers leaned on home-grown leaf for their filler - a cigar made entirely of imported Cuban tobacco was a luxury few of them could manage. This fifteen-cent Corona puts 100% imported Havana filler right on the label, and Havana meant Cuba. Of the island's tobacco-growing districts, the one counted best is the Vuelta Abajo, way out in Pinar del Río, Cuba's westernmost province, and plenty of cigar folks will still tell you it grows the finest tobacco in the world.

The town on that tiny printer's line has a story too. Carle Place is a hamlet in the Town of North Hempstead, out in Nassau County, and it's named for a house: in the 1800s Silas Carle had a 32-room country home built there that everybody just called "the Carle place." The house still stands, near Jericho Turnpike and Carle Road. The name has wandered a bit - from about 1895 to 1915 the area went by Mineola Park, after a real estate development that never took off, before going back to Carle Place, and locals still call it Frog Hollow (that's where the school mascot comes from). Then in 1946 William J. Levitt bought 19 acres by the Carle Place train station and put up 600 low-cost houses, his trial run for Levittown a few miles away. Within five years returning veterans and their families had swelled the population by 500 percent, and in 1951 - the same year Consolidated's new plant went up there - somebody made one last try at renaming the place. The name held.