Vintage Combo Coach and Four Soda Labels 🐎 from the 1970s

Want All Seven Coach and Four Soda Flavors? 🐎 The Coach and Four Line, All Seven Flavors

Size: 3 1/2" x 2 1/2" ~ Unused. ~ little to slight wear.

This is a set of seven Coach and Four bottle labels - Sarsaparilla, Bitter Lemon, Black Raspberry Soda, Ginger Beer, Ginger Ale, Tonic Water and Club Soda - every one of them wearing the same stagecoach-and-four-horses mark in its own color band. A "coach and four" is literally a carriage pulled by four horses, and that's exactly the little scene printed across each label: team out front, coach behind, reins in hand. Whoever built this brand knew what they were doing - it's a mark you'd spot across a whole shelf of flavors without reading a word.

📮 The Zip Codes Start the Dating

Every label reads "Bottled under authority of Coach and Four Products Co., Phila., Pa." with a five-digit zip code printed right after the address - the Sarsaparilla, Bitter Lemon, Black Raspberry and Ginger Beer say 19140, and the Ginger Ale, Tonic Water and Club Soda say 19117. Five-digit zip codes are younger than you'd think: the Post Office Department didn't introduce them until July 1, 1963, and rolled them out with a cartoon mascot named Mr. ZIP and something like 72 million postcards mailed that day to explain the new system. So any label carrying one of these codes was printed in 1963 or later. I like when the object hands you its own timestamp like that.

🍹 More Bar Cart Than Soda Fountain

Look at the flavor list and this set skews grown-up. Tonic Water says "Contains Quinine" right on the label. Bitter Lemon is "made with whole lemons and quinine salt." Ginger Beer lists "Jamaica ginger, citric acid and citrus oils." Between those, Club Soda and Ginger Ale, that's most of a 1970s home bar in one lineup - with Sarsaparilla and Black Raspberry Soda thrown in for whoever at the party wasn't drinking cocktails.

🏭 Bottled Under Authority Of

"Bottled under authority of" is printed right on every label, and it is the brand company signing for its bottler. Here the bottler was family: the Coach and Four partnership and the Sheffield bottling works shared North 6th Street. And the company does have a paper trail, in the U.S. Patent Office. The name first went on soft drinks on June 26, 1956, spelled COACH'N FOUR back then, and it was registered on January 29, 1957 (trademark No. 640,759, for "maltless soft drinks and carbonated waters") by Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership doing business as "Coach 'N Four Products Co.," with Harry Labovitz signing as a partner. On July 11, 1969 Sheffield handed the name and its goodwill to a new partnership, Coach and Four Products Company, which was Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia, ZIP 19140. That's the company name printed on every label in this set, and in January 1971 the registration was amended to the new owner and to the COACH AND FOUR form these labels carry, so these belong to the Labovitz years of the 1970s. The trademark was renewed in 1977 and finally lapsed in 1997. The other ZIP, 19117 on the Ginger Ale, Tonic Water and Club Soda, is Elkins Park, just over the city line in Cheltenham Township, so the company printed from two addresses over its life.

🏠 The family bottling works behind the stagecoach

Coach and Four was a brand of Sheffield Bottling Co., a family soda works at 3727-3729 North 6th Street, listed there in a bottlers' trade journal as early as 1945. Sheffield told the Patent Office it had used its mark on soft drinks since October 6, 1931. In 1949 Mr. Labovitz of Sheffield was president of the Philadelphia Manufacturers of Carbonated Beverages and sat on the board of the Pennsylvania Bottlers Association, and in 1950 Sheffield was packing Logan Beverages for the Penn Mutual Grocery Co. A 1974 Philadelphia industrial directory still lists the Sheffield Beverage company at 3729 N. 6th St., ZIP 19140, making soft drinks with 20 employees, Harry and Arthur Labovitz partners.

A grandson of the family got in touch with me about this brand, and the way the family tells it, Coach and Four was meant to be the more polished line next to the everyday Sheffield label. This set is the Coach and Four side of that business: the dressier names, sarsaparilla instead of root beer, and tonic water, bitter lemon, ginger beer and club soda for the bar. The Sheffield label carried the everyday flavors, which the family remembers as orange, lemon, grapefruit, lime, cola, root beer, quinine water, club soda, cream, the cherries, ginger ale, Zip Gassosa, grape and wintergreen. The cherries were three: Wishniak, made to win over the Polish neighborhoods (wiśniak is the Polish name for a cherry cordial) against the much bigger Frank's, plus Cherry and Maraschino, all one recipe. Rising Sun, one of the bottlers the family says they took over, had been started by Nicola Di Croce, born in Pianella, Italy, in 1879. A big part of the business was filling seltzer bottles for Philadelphia's hotels and bars and for the dining cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad, headquartered right here in Philadelphia, and when Sheffield bought out smaller bottlers it kept their labels, Girard and Rising Sun among them, running on the old routes so the customers got what they were used to.

⚖️ The milk company that wanted the name

In November 1961 Sheffield applied to register its own label: SHEFFIELD on a red-and-gold pennant with a chess knight and the word "Tingly." National Dairy Products Corporation, the company behind New York's Sheffield Farms milk, opposed it, and its own Sheffield Farms carbonated drinks, ginger ale and club soda among them, came up in the case. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board dismissed the opposition on June 7, 1967. National Dairy appealed to the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, and that appeal was dismissed on May 9, 1969. Two months later the Coach and Four name went to its own company. The family remembers the legal bills of fighting for the Sheffield name, with more still coming, as the reason everything moved over to Coach and Four. And that chess knight? The grandson says his dad loved carved chess pieces.

🫚 A Little History in Every Flavor

Tonic water began as medicine: British officers in 19th-century India took bitter quinine against malaria and mixed it with soda and sugar to get it down, the first commercial tonic was patented in London in 1858, and the gin and tonic turns up in print in 1868. Ginger beer is older still, first brewed in Yorkshire in the mid-1700s, and in 1928 a snail in a bottle of it in Paisley, Scotland led to Donoghue v Stevenson, the 1932 case that founded modern negligence law. Sarsaparilla was sold in the 1800s as a "blood purifier," and after the FDA banned sassafras oil in 1960 it had to be flavored another way, which is why Coach and Four's label says "artificial sarsaparilla flavoring."

🎨 The Name

Philadelphia's most famous coach and four is Thomas Eakins's painting The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (1879 to 1880), in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with the horses posed from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion. A Philadelphia soda company picked a great Philadelphia image for its mark.