Vintage Tin Box Lot 🏪 9 Tins with Hershey's 2002 Trolley Canister, Royal Dansk, Pepperidge Farm Pirouette, Cardinal & Christmas Kittens

Which Tin Hauled Milk for Milton Hershey? 🚋 Nine Tins, and One of Them Hauled Milk for Milton Hershey

Size: 7" x 5 1/2" x 3 1/4" ~ Light wear from age and handling, a few minor scratches on the cardinal tin and the nut brittle tin, no major dents. All nine tins are empty.

The joke is old enough to count as folklore: lift the lid of a blue Royal Dansk tin at Grandma's house and there are no butter cookies inside, only buttons, needles and spools of thread. This lot has that tin, its Luxury Wafers cousins, and a green-lidded Hershey's canister built like a streetcar and lettered HERSHEY TRANSIT CO. That streetcar was real. From October 15, 1904 until December 21, 1946, Milton Hershey's trolleys carried workers to his chocolate factory for a nickel and brought milk cans in from the dairy farms around Hershey, Pennsylvania. Nine tins in all, and nearly every one comes with the story of the company that filled it.

📦 What Is in the Lot

• Hershey's Vehicle Series Canister #3, Trolley — a streetcar-shaped tin with a green lid, HERSHEY TRANSIT CO. down the side, route number 1 at each end, passengers in straw boaters and flowered hats at the windows, and metal wheels. The base carries a printed history of the Hershey trolleys, the UPC, and a copyright line, container made in China. A paper sticker for 5.5 oz. of fruit candy, distributed from New Castle, Pennsylvania, sits across the base.
• Pepperidge Farm Pirouette French Vanilla canister — the tall cylinder with the blue lid and rolled wafers pictured on the side: "Delicate, pastry-like rolled wafer with luscious, creamy filling ...what's not to love?"
• Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookies — the round blue tin, 12 oz (340 g), gold rim, a half-timbered Danish farmhouse on the lid and a small seal reading Quality Since 1966.
• Royal Dansk Luxury Wafers — tall blue canisters "with delicious vanilla crème," in the 12.3 oz (350 g) and 3.5 oz (100 g) sizes.
• Mixed nut brittle tin — a rectangle of red and green stripes and dots on chocolate brown: "mixed nut brittle, A Uniquely Crunchy Classic Confection," NET WT 8 OZ (227 g).
• Cardinal tin — rounded corners and a blue-sky border. In the window a cardinal perches on a branch with acorns, and the red leaves beside him turn out to be cardinals too, their feathers drawn as leaf veins. Along the bottom edge a row of songbirds shares a wire.
• Christmas kittens tin — a grey-and-white kitten with a bell on its red collar and a ginger tabby beside a gold ribbon bow look out of a red-framed window, over a Christmas patchwork of holly, stars, a stocking, a snowman, and squares numbered 24 and 25.

Nine tins altogether. The largest tin measures approximately 7 x 5 1/2 x 3 1/4 inches.

🚃 The Trolley on the Tin: Hershey Transit Company

Milton S. Hershey chartered the Hummelstown and Campbelltown Street Railway in January 1903, before workers had even broken ground for his new chocolate factory. The first cars ran on October 15, 1904. Milk chocolate needs fresh milk every single day, so the line was laid past dairy farms where farmers could set their cans out to be picked up. By the early 1920s the factory was using about 15 million gallons of milk a year, much of it still arriving by trolley, and one car could come back carrying 200 to 250 cans. Hershey held the basic fare at five cents and rode the cars himself to watch how his employees used them.

The lines were brought together as the Hershey Transit Company in 1913 and grew to about 36 miles of track, reaching Hummelstown, Palmyra, Elizabethtown, Campbelltown and Lebanon, with connections on to Harrisburg. Milk went over to tanker trucks in 1942. At midnight on December 21, 1946, cars No. 17, No. 21 and No. 23 rolled out of the square in Hershey on the final run, and buses took over. The canister's base tells the same story in miniature.

The Vehicle Series ran at least three canisters: a #1 milk truck, a blue #2 trolley dated 2000, and this green #3 trolley. Other examples of this exact #3 base — same UPC, same printed history — read "© 2002 Hershey Foods Corporation"; the digit on this particular canister's base has worn past reading, but it's the same #3 printing. The company itself was Hershey Chocolate Corporation from 1927, took the name Hershey Foods Corporation in 1968 as it grew past chocolate, and became The Hershey Company in 2005 — so a tin marked Hershey Foods Corporation belongs to that 37-year stretch, and this one is a 2002 piece within it.

🍪 Margaret Rudkin and the Pepperidge Farm Canister

Pepperidge Farm began in 1937 in the Fairfield, Connecticut kitchen of Margaret Rudkin. Her youngest son, Mark, had asthma and was allergic to most commercially processed food, so she baked him whole wheat bread with no preservatives and named the business after the family's 123-acre farm, which took its name from the pepperidge tree. Her husband Henry, a Wall Street broker, carried loaves into New York City to sell to specialty shops. Baking moved from the kitchen to the garage, to a factory in 1940, and in 1947 to a modern bakery in Norwalk, Connecticut. In 1961 she sold the company to the Campbell Soup Company for $28 million and became the first woman on Campbell's board of directors. Television kept her farmhouse image going for years with the slogan "Pepperidge Farm remembers."

This canister dates itself by its phone number. Toll-free 800 numbers were nearly used up by the middle of the nineties, and the new 888 prefix went live on March 1, 1996.

🧵 Royal Dansk: The Blue Tin and the Sewing Kit Legend

Royal Dansk was founded in 1966 in Helsingør, Denmark, which is why each Royal Dansk tin in this lot carries the little Quality Since 1966 seal. In 1990 it merged with Kjeldsen, the bakery Anna and Marinus Kjeldsen opened in Nørre Snede in 1933, and together they became Kelsen. The farmhouse on Royal Dansk packaging is the Hjemstavnsgaard, an old farm on the Danish island of Funen. Campbell Soup Company bought Kelsen in 2013, which put Royal Dansk under the same corporate roof as Pepperidge Farm for six years, until Ferrero paid $300 million for it in 2019. The cookies are still baked in Denmark, at Nørre Snede and Ribe, more than 25,000 tonnes of them a year.

Then there is the legend. Generations of kids have pried open a Royal Dansk tin expecting butter cookies and found a sewing kit instead, a letdown so universal it has become a running joke online. It also explains why these tins survive: once the cookies were gone, the blue tin was never thrown out. It was promoted to the sewing basket.

🐦 The Cardinal Tin and an Old Saying

Few backyard birds carry as much folklore as the cardinal. In the American South and Midwest, grandmothers told grandchildren that a cardinal at the window was a visitor from heaven, and the idea that a cardinal is a loved one stopping by has passed from porch to porch until it feels like common knowledge. The saying "When cardinals appear, angels are near," credited to a poem by Victoria McGovern, now turns up on sympathy cards, garden stones and wall art. This tin adds a painter's joke to the tradition, hiding extra cardinals among the red leaves.

🎄 The Holiday Tins

The kittens tin is a Christmas tin through and through: its patchwork squares numbered 24 and 25 are the last two doors of an Advent calendar, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The mixed nut brittle tin is the kind of reusable candy tin that shows up under trees and on office gift tables every December and then stays in the house for years holding screws, recipe cards or crayons.