Vintage 1950s Budd Orange Soda Label Pair 🥤 Set of Two, Budd's Beverages Newport & Lebanon New Hampshire Lithograph

When Did Budd's Bottle Soda in Lebanon, New Hampshire? 🍊 Budd Orange Soda Label, The Taste Tells - Budd's Beverages, Inc., Newport & Lebanon, New Hampshire

Size: 4 1/4" x 3 3/4" each

This one's a pair - two of these Budd Orange Soda labels come to you together.

This is the Lebanon version - the one with both towns on it, CONTENTS NEWPORT, N.H., LEBANON, N.H., from when Budd's was bottling and selling out of Lebanon too. Red Budd script over the gold soda glass, THE TASTE TELLS, ORANGE SODA, made from carbonated filtered water, cane sugar, flavor, citric acid and artificial color, Quality Beverages Since 1916, Budd's Beverages, Inc., one pint ten ounces. Never used. Both of yours will look just like this one.

🏪 From Horse and Wagon to Budd's Beverages, Inc.

Newport was a hard-working mill town long before there was any soda in it. It's the county seat of Sullivan County, it had three woolen mills and two tanneries running by 1859, and its Sibley Scythe Company made the scythes that cleared jungle when the Panama Canal went in. The business started in 1916 as A. Budnitz & Son on Sullivan Street in Newport, back in the horse-and-buggy days of the soft drink trade, with hand-powered machinery and a horse and wagon for deliveries. The story everybody tells is that it began as a grocery for Newport's Polish community and got into soda in 1922 at the Newport Bottling Works. It moved to Sunapee Street in 1929, put in modern syrup and bottling rooms in 1938, and wholesaled beer from Repeal on. Dealers who handled the old stock say the house brands included Dartmouth Dry, Fruit Bowl and Old Sol, that it distributed Moxie and Coca-Cola, and that there was a bowling alley on the top floor - and the town reports do show Isaac Budd paying for a bowling alley license in the mid-1930s.

🏔️ The Lebanon Years

In 1948 the business, still called the Newport Bottling Works, incorporated as Budd's Beverages, Inc. and the same year opened a warehouse in Lebanon. Lebanon is up in Grafton County on the Connecticut River, with Vermont right across the water. A 1952 Lebanon High School yearbook ad bragged "36 Years In Good Taste." Alexander Budnitz, the founder, died in 1954 at 80; his son Isaac Budd was president in 1961, when the firm celebrated its 45th year (Elihu M. Budd came into the business in 1954, after the Army), and by 1971 Millard La Joie was president of a ten-person bottling works at 91 Sunapee Street. Millard was a Lebanon man all his life - born there on December 29, 1922, went to Lebanon High School, served in the Army in World War II - and he worked at Budd's in Lebanon and Newport for many years before he bought the company, which he owned and ran for several years. Budd's closed its doors in 1972. Living in New Hampshire you hear my elders talk about Budd's with real nostalgia - by the 1930s it was famous all over Vermont and New Hampshire.

🔎 Dating It

The "Inc." can't be older than March 31, 1948, and every dated trace of the Lebanon branch falls between 1948 and 1954. The contents line is the plain "1 PT. 10 FL. OZS." with no total in ounces and no ZIP code, and the federal label rules that took effect at the end of 1967 called for both - so this is a 1950s label. It's the same Budd plate as the older Newport Bottling Works labels, with the new company name and the second town at the foot. The New Hampshire Historical Society keeps Budd's bottles from across the years, from an embossed Budds Best of the Newport Bottling Works to a 1961 Sun Spot orange soda that Budd's bottled in Newport and a 1962 painted-label bottle that still says The Taste Tells, both of those made by Thatcher Glass.

A happy one framed in a kitchen - and for anybody from Lebanon or Newport, a little bit of home. The supply is finite - Budd's closed in 1972, nobody's printing their orange labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.