Vintage 1970s Coach and Four Sarsaparilla 🍺 Soda Bottle Label Philadelphia PA Coach & Four Products Co.

Remember Coach and Four Sarsaparilla? Sarsaparilla After the Sassafras Ban 🥤

Size: 3 1/2" x 2 1/2" ~ little to no wear.

Classic American sarsaparilla was not made from the sarsaparilla vine at all. It was made from birch oil and sassafras root bark. Then, effective November 30, 1960, the Food and Drug Administration refused to allow safrole or oil of sassafras in food, on laboratory evidence that safrole caused cancer in test animals, and every commercial maker had to find the old flavor without its oldest ingredient. This 1970s Philadelphia label, printed well after ZIP codes arrived in 1963, answers the question in its own fine print with two words: ARTIFICIAL SARSAPARILLA FLAVORING. It comes from Coach and Four Products Co., in the city where American soda began, and it was never put on a bottle.

🏷️ What the Label Prints

• Brand: COACH AND FOUR in white serif capitals, the word AND set small between them, with the ® registered-trademark mark
• Picture: a black silhouette of a stagecoach behind four galloping horses, the driver's whip curling overhead and passengers riding up top, on a tan band edged in olive gold
• Flavor: Sarsaparilla in white italic script, a small star over the i
• Fine print: CONTAINS CARBONATED WATER, SUGAR, CARAMEL COLORING, ARTIFICIAL SARSAPARILLA FLAVORING, PRESERVED WITH SODIUM BENZOATE. BOTTLED UNDER AUTHORITY OF COACH AND FOUR PRODUCTS CO., PHILA., PA. 19140
• Colors: near-black ground, tan and olive-gold band, white lettering
• Back: plain paper, the front's design faintly visible through it in mirror image
• Condition: unused, never applied to a bottle

🧪 Reading the Fine Print: Sarsaparilla After 1960

Safrole is the main aromatic oil of sassafras root bark; oil of sassafras is about 80 percent safrole. FDA laboratory studies showed safrole to be a carcinogen in test animals, and the order published in the Federal Register of December 3, 1960 made any food with added safrole or sassafras oil adulterated under federal law. The prohibition still stands in the Code of Federal Regulations, at 21 CFR 189.180. The ban changed the drink: commercial root beer and sarsaparilla makers turned to artificial flavorings and safrole-free extracts, with wintergreen, long part of the root beer recipe, ready to fill in.

Put that beside this label. Its ZIP code means it went to press after July 1, 1963, well after the ban took effect, and its ingredient panel lists carbonated water, sugar, caramel coloring and sodium benzoate along with the flavoring it names plainly as artificial. It is the post-sassafras sarsaparilla, spelled out on a label the size of a playing card.

🤠 Sarsaparilla: Patent Medicine, Then the Cowboy's Drink

The name belongs to Smilax, a tropical vine whose root was sold as medicine. In nineteenth-century America sarsaparilla was a patent medicine, its advertisements promising help for skin and blood problems, and like most soft drinks of the day it was first poured at drugstore soda counters. The Old West legend did the rest. Sarsaparilla still conjures, in a phrase quoted in its Wikipedia entry, "languid belles and parched cowboys," and the cowboy who orders one at a saloon bar is the picture most Americans carry of it. The twist the legend leaves out is that the American drink usually held no sarsaparilla root at all, only birch oil and sassafras. Today it is not easy to find in most countries, yet it stays a common soft drink in the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia.

🔔 Philadelphia, Where American Soda Began

The city printed on this label has a fair claim to the whole business. Dr. Philip Syng Physick, a Philadelphia physician, added carbon dioxide to plain water for his patients, and in 1807 the pharmacist Townsend Speakman began selling fruit juice mixed with carbonated water, often counted as the first American soft drink. Sixty-eight years later another Philadelphia pharmacist, Charles E. Hires, blended sarsaparilla, sassafras, wild cherry, wintergreen and ginger into a root beer he sold at his drugstore at Sixth and Spruce Streets. At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park he gave away samples to a huge audience, and heavy advertising with trade cards carried Hires root beer to national fame. The temperance movement helped, handing drinkers a nonalcoholic glass with the name of a beer.

🏭 Coach and Four Products Co. and "Bottled Under Authority Of"

The label names one company: Coach and Four Products Co., Philadelphia. Its wording repays a close read. "Bottled under authority of" is the phrase a label carries when a bottler fills bottles with the permission of the company that owns the brand. Here the bottler was family: the Labovitzes' own Sheffield works, on the same North 6th Street block as the brand. So the name on the bottom line is the brand's owner, and the ® beside COACH AND FOUR shows the name was a registered trademark. The same stagecoach picture turns up on the brand's Ginger Beer, Ginger Ale and Club Soda labels, a family of mixers and soft drinks sharing one design.

The people behind it are on file at the U.S. Patent Office. The name first went on soft drinks on June 26, 1956, spelled COACH'N FOUR back then, and was registered on January 29, 1957 (trademark No. 640,759) by Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership trading as "Coach 'N Four Products Co.," with Harry Labovitz signing as a partner. On July 11, 1969 the name and its goodwill passed to Coach and Four Products Company, the partnership of Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia, ZIP 19140, which is the company named on this label. 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 lapsed in 1997.

🏠 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. That is the whole reason this label says Sarsaparilla: the Sheffield label sold the same kind of drink as plain root beer, and Coach and Four was where the fancier name went. 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.

📮 19140: Hunting Park and Nicetown–Tioga

The ZIP code both dates the label and places it. The Post Office Department introduced five-digit ZIP codes on July 1, 1963, so a label printing 19140 was printed that summer or later, and the Coach and Four Products Co. name at its foot, under the COACH AND FOUR form that went onto the registration only in January 1971, makes this one a 1970s label. 19140 covers roughly Hunting Park and Nicetown–Tioga in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hunting Park takes its name from a nineteenth-century park laid out on the James Logan estate and a race track known as the Hunting Park Course. Nicetown, the story goes, is named for Hans te Neues, a Mennonite immigrant who bought the land in 1699; another account credits the de Neus family, Dutch Huguenots who settled there about 1700. Tioga is a Mohawk and Iroquois word for a place where a stream forks or runs swiftly, and the name has been used in North Philadelphia since at least the mid-nineteenth century.

This was factory country. In 1918 women worked the ordnance shops of the Midvale Steel and Ordnance Company in Nicetown, and the district's industrial life peaked during World War II before declining right after the war. The Coach and Four address sits in that same working North Philadelphia.

🐎 The Coach and Four: A Philadelphia Painting and an Old Saying

A coach and four is a coach drawn by four horses, driven four-in-hand by one driver holding the reins of all four. Philadelphia has a famous one. Fairman Rogers, a civil engineer and retired University of Pennsylvania professor, founded the Philadelphia Coaching Club and commissioned Thomas Eakins to paint him driving a coaching party through Fairmount Park. The painting, first titled A May Morning in the Park (1879–80) and now known as The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Eakins posed its horses from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion, which makes it one of the first paintings to show precisely how horses move.

The phrase has a lawyer's history too. Around 1670 the Irish lawyer Stephen Rice, fighting the Act of Settlement, is said to have vowed to drive a coach and six horses through it, and the saying that a coach and four can be driven through an Act of Parliament came to mean that a clever lawyer can always find a loophole. The silhouette on this label, whip raised and horses at full stretch, is the coach and four at speed.

🖼️ Condition and Display

Unused and never applied, so the white lettering stays crisp against the dark ground. The back is plain, with the design readable through the paper in reverse. At 3.5 by 2.5 inches it suits a small frame, a shadow box beside an old soda bottle, or a kitchen or home bar wall.

• Collectors of soda labels and soft drink advertising
• Philadelphia history, especially North Philadelphia, Hunting Park and Nicetown–Tioga
• Root beer and sarsaparilla fans, and anyone who remembers ordering a sarsaparilla
• Western and stagecoach collectors
• A home bar or kitchen display

🥤 About these

The supply is finite - nobody's printing Coach and Four labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.