Vintage 1970s Coach and Four Tonic Water Label 🐎 from Philadelphia

Who Mixed With Coach and Four Tonic Water? 🐎 Vintage 1970s Soda Label, Philadelphia

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

Of all the Coach and Four labels, I think this Tonic Water one is one of the sharpest: that little stagecoach, those clean colors, and two words on it, CONTAINS QUININE, that carry about four hundred years of history. Here's the story.

🐎 What's on it

COACH AND FOUR ® across the top in cream letters on black, then a bright red band edged in cream with a black coach-and-four silhouette on it, Tonic Water in big white script below, then "Contains quinine. Preserved with sodium benzoate." and along the foot, "Bottled under authority of Coach and Four Products Co., Phila., Pa. 19117." The back is plain paper.

👬 The people behind the stagecoach

The name was first used on soft drinks on June 26, 1956, spelled COACH'N FOUR back then. Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership doing business as "Coach 'N Four Products Co.," filed it with the U.S. Patent Office that July and had it registered on January 29, 1957 (trademark No. 640,759, for "maltless soft drinks and carbonated waters"). Harry Labovitz signed as a partner.

On July 11, 1969 the name and its goodwill passed to Coach and Four Products Company, a partnership of Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz, then on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia, ZIP 19140. In January 1971 the registration was amended to the new owner and to the COACH AND FOUR form printed on this label. 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. Sheffield's own flavor list had quinine water on it. On the Coach and Four label it's Tonic Water, the dressier name, which is just what the family says the brand was for. 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.

Now look at the ZIP on this one: 19117. That's Elkins Park, in Cheltenham Township, just over Philadelphia's northern city line. Most of the Coach and Four flavors carry 19140, but this Tonic Water, the Ginger Ale and the Club Soda carry 19117, so the company printed labels from two different addresses over its life. Two printings, two addresses, one little stagecoach.

The whole 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.

📅 How old is it?

A five-digit ZIP can't be earlier than July 1, 1963, when ZIP codes began, and the name printed here, Coach and Four Products Co., is the company the brand passed to in July 1969 - before that, the partnership signed its papers under the Coach 'N Four name - and the COACH AND FOUR form across the top only went onto the registration in January 1971. That makes this a 1970s printing, a real vintage Philadelphia mixer label.

🌿 Quinine, the reason tonic exists

Quinine comes from the bark of the cinchona tree. The Spanish learned to use it in the 1600s from the Indigenous peoples of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, and it became the first real treatment for malaria. In early 19th-century India, British officers and soldiers were told to take their quinine every day, and it was so bitter that they mixed it with soda and sugar to get it down. That was tonic water.

The first commercial tonic water was patented in 1858 by Erasmus Bond of Pitt & Co. in London. Soldiers were already adding their gin ration to it, and the gin and tonic shows up in print for the first time in the Oriental Sporting Magazine in 1868. Medicine became a cocktail.

Modern tonic is much gentler than the old medicine. In the United States the FDA caps quinine in tonic water at 83 parts per million. And here's my favorite bit of tonic trivia: put a glass of it under a blacklight and it glows blue, because the quinine soaks up the ultraviolet and gives it back as visible light.

🎨 A coach and four

A coach and four is a carriage pulled by four horses, driven four-in-hand by one driver holding every rein. Philadelphia's most famous one is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Thomas Eakins's The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (1879 to 1880), which shows the engineer and coachman Fairman Rogers driving a coaching party through Fairmount Park. Eakins posed the horses from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion, so it's one of the first paintings to get a horse's stride exactly right. There's an old legal saying too, that a clever lawyer can drive a coach and four through any Act of Parliament, meaning there's always a loophole. A good name for a Philadelphia soda.

🏡 Display

This looks great framed behind a home bar, especially next to an old tonic bottle or a gin bottle, and it's even better with the rest of the Coach and Four flavors as a set.