Vintage 1940s Garden Bouquet Toilet Soap Label 🧼 Very Rare, Manhattan, NY

Who Made Garden Bouquet Toilet Soap? 🧼 Garden Bouquet Toilet Soap Wrapper, Manhattan Soap Co., Inc., New York

Size: 7" x 4 3/4" ~ Unused.

So pretty and so simple! This is a vintage 1940s Garden Bouquet toilet soap wrapper from the Manhattan Soap Co., Inc. of New York, never wrapped around a bar. Garden Bouquet is written in a flowing slate-blue script, with TOILET SOAP underneath, over a little picture of a wrought-iron garden gate on a stone path with red and blue flowers spilling out on both sides. The name repeats up both side panels and upside down on the top flap, so it read right-side up from every side once it was folded around the soap, and the corners are cut for folding.

Like everything I keep, it lives in the dark at under 40% relative humidity and a steady 72°F, climate controlled, so any age it shows, it had before it came to me.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• Garden Bouquet TOILET SOAP
• Garden Bouquet (on the flap and both side panels)
• USE GARDEN BOUQUET FOR FRESH & EXQUISITE CLEANLINESS
• "GARDEN BOUQUET TOILET SOAP IS A HIGH GRADE FRENCH MILLED SOAP. MILD AND NEUTRAL FOR THE MOST SENSITIVE SKIN. LATHERS FREELY IN ALL KINDS OF WATER."
• MANHATTAN SOAP CO., INC., NEW YORK

French milled means the soap was run through steel rollers again and again before it was pressed, which made a harder, smoother, longer-lasting bar. That's why it gets top billing on the back panel.

🗽 The Manhattan Soap Company

The Manhattan Soap Company was Frank Gaius Burke's, a former North Dakota sheep man and Texas cattleman who came to New York in 1888 (the founding year shows up as 1885, 1888 or 1890 depending on the source), and it's best remembered for two soaps: Sweetheart, and this one, Garden Bouquet. The company started out at 426 West 38th Street in Manhattan, had an early plant on Stone Street, and in November 1916 bought waterfront property at the Degnon Terminal on Hunterspoint Avenue in Long Island City, Queens. By 1937 its offices were at 441 Lexington Avenue.

It had its run-ins with the regulators like everybody else. In April 1937 Manhattan Soap agreed to stop using the word "doctor" in its ads, since the government thought people might take it to mean a physician had a hand in the soap, and it promised the Federal Trade Commission it wouldn't print false prices on its soap cartons. On July 31, 1956, the Purex company bought Manhattan Soap, by then best known for Sweetheart, and kept that famous oval Sweetheart bar with the raised wreath around the edge. In 1925 the company also took over the old World War I Harriman shipyard building at Bristol, Pennsylvania, for its works. By 1942 an export listing was offering "Sweetheart, Corona and Garden Bouquet toilet soaps," and the sellers who've had the YMCA summer camp boxes that came with Garden Bouquet bars date those to the 1950s.

📅 How Old Is It?

Garden Bouquet gives its own age away. When Purex registered GARDEN BOUQUET as a toilet soap trademark (filed 1959, registered 1960), it gave the name's first use as July 24, 1940. The maker's line on the wrapper still reads MANHATTAN SOAP CO., INC., the name the company signed from about 1923 until Purex bought it in 1956. So this wrapper was printed after the summer of 1940 and before the Purex takeover, and I put it in the 1940s, Garden Bouquet's first decade.

🏡 Display

It's lovely framed in a bathroom, a powder room or a guest room, and a perfect gift for a gardener, a soap maker, or anybody from New York City. They aren't making any more vintage soap wrappers like this obviously, so once these last unused ones are gone they'll be very difficult to acquire.