Vintage 1970s Stage Coach and Four Ginger Ale Soda Beverage Label 🥤 Philadelphia, PA

Remember Everyday Ginger Ale? 🥤 Vintage 1970s Stage Coach and Four Ginger Ale Label, Philadelphia, PA

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

This label is becoming uncommon now and is very collectible. Really cool stagecoach and colors! Ginger ale was the everyday workhorse of the whole Coach and Four line, and it has a family tree that runs from Belfast to Toronto to Detroit before it ever reached this Philadelphia label.

🐎 What's on it

A small paper bottle label for Coach and Four Ginger Ale in deep brown, bright green and gold. Across the top, COACH AND FOUR ® in cream letters. Through the middle, a bright green band between two thin gold rules, and on it a black silhouette of a coachman driving four horses at full gallop. Then Ginger Ale in a big cream script with a little star at the front, and the fine print: "Caramel colored. Bottled under authority of Coach and Four Products Co., Phila., Pa. 19117." The back is plain paper. It's New Old Stock, printed and never pasted on a bottle.

👬 The people behind the stagecoach

The name went on soft drinks for the first time on June 26, 1956, spelled COACH'N FOUR back then, and a month later it was filed with the U.S. Patent Office by Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership doing business as "Coach 'N Four Products Co." It was registered on January 29, 1957 as trademark No. 640,759, for "maltless soft drinks and carbonated waters." That's the little ® on the label. Signing for Sheffield, as a partner, was Harry Labovitz.

On July 11, 1969, Sheffield handed the name and all its goodwill to a new partnership, Coach and Four Products Company, made up of Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz, on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia. That is the exact company name printed on this label, and in January 1971 the registration was amended to the new owner and to the COACH AND FOUR form printed here. The trademark was renewed in 1977 and finally lapsed in 1997, forty-one years after that first bottle in 1956.

🏠 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. Ginger ale is right there on Sheffield's own flavor list, and it turns up in the lawsuit below as well. 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.

"Bottled under authority of" names the brand owner: the company owned the name and the recipes, and the family's own Sheffield plant on North 6th Street filled and capped the bottles under its label. The Coach and Four line ran to ginger ale, ginger beer, tonic water, bitter lemon, club soda, sarsaparilla and black raspberry, a full lineup of mixers for a Philadelphia bar or a family's basement fridge.

📅 How old is it?

That five-digit ZIP, 19117, can't be earlier than July 1, 1963, the day ZIP codes began. And 19117 isn't in the city itself: it's Elkins Park, just over Philadelphia's northern line in Cheltenham Township, Montgomery County, even though the label still says "Phila." Other Coach and Four flavors print 19140, North Philadelphia, where the 1969 partnership was on North 6th Street, so the company printed labels from two addresses over the years. The 1969 company name at the foot, and the COACH AND FOUR form across the top that only went onto the registration in January 1971, make this a 1970s label, true vintage Philadelphia soda history.

🐴 What collectors pass along

Every little brand like this picks up a story or two. Delaware Valley bottling historians tell how the region's independent bottlers faded as the national brands built their own local plants and the business changed around them, and Coach and Four's own paper trail fits that story: a family partnership, a trademark that ran from 1956 to 1997, and a lineup of flavors people remember.

🫚 Golden or dry? The ginger ale family tree

Ginger ale comes in two styles, and they come from two different men. The first ginger ale came out of Belfast, Ireland, in the 1850s, from Thomas Joseph Cantrell, an Irish apothecary and surgeon, and his was the golden style: darker and stronger on the ginger. Cantrell's name lived on in the Dublin firm of Cantrell & Cochrane, the same company that gave the world the name "club soda."

The second style came from Canada. John McLaughlin, who had opened a soda water bottling plant in Toronto in 1890, began working on flavor extracts in 1904 and that year introduced a "Pale Dry" ginger ale, paler and much milder on the ginger. He registered the Canada Dry name in 1907, and the pale style's big break came in the States during Prohibition, when its clean taste was just the thing for hiding the flavor of homemade liquor. Meanwhile Detroit had Vernors, a golden ginger ale aged in oak barrels, dating to 1866 and counted as one of the very first American soft drinks.

Coach and Four's says "Caramel colored" right on the label, so it poured a deeper amber than an uncolored pale ginger ale. And whatever the style, ginger ale has always pulled double duty: a mixer for the highball and the holiday punch, and the old family remedy for an upset stomach.

🎨 A coach and four

A coach and four is a carriage drawn by four horses, all four driven "four-in-hand" by one driver holding every rein. Philadelphia has the most famous one in American art. Around 1879 to 1880, Fairman Rogers, a Philadelphia engineer and devoted coachman, had Thomas Eakins paint him driving a coaching party through Fairmount Park. The painting, The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand, hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Eakins posed its horses from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion, which makes it one of the first paintings to show exactly how horses move. A Philadelphia soda company choosing a coach and four for its label was picking one of the city's own great images.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That brown and bright green look great with a wide mat in either color, it's right at home on a bar cart or in a dining room, and it pairs up nicely with the rest of the Coach and Four flavors if you want the whole set together.