Antique OG-NA Brand Tomatoes Label 🪶 Fabius NY Native American Chief Gold Embossed Can Label

Who Was E.H. Rowley of Fabius? 🪶 Antique 1920s OG-NA Brand Tomatoes Can Label

Size: 14" x 4 1/2"

An unused antique can label, made to wrap a big 2 lb. 1 oz. tin of tomatoes from a little canning factory in Fabius, New York. OG-NA in raised gold letters, a fat red tomato on one end and a chief in a feathered war bonnet on the other. A small-town packer ordered these so his tomatoes could hold their own on any grocer's shelf, and this one never made it around a can.

🍅 E.H. Rowley, Canner

Edward Hibberd Rowley was born in 1873 at Three Mile Bay, up in Jefferson County, and was farming in Fabius by 1900. The 1910 census has him down as a manager and treasurer. By 1917 he owned a vegetable canning factory in town, and the 1920 census finds him on North Main Street, listed simply as a canner. He put his tomatoes up under two names, Rowley's Fancy Quality and OG-NA, and his family's own history puts the OG-NA labels around the 1920s. The EHR monogram on the little shields at either side is his. He stayed in Fabius the rest of his life, died there in 1946, and he's buried in Fabius's Evergreen Cemetery.

🏛️ A Town Named for a Roman General

Fabius sits up in the hills south of Syracuse, in Onondaga County. After the Revolutionary War, New York laid out the Military Tract across the middle of the state to pay its soldiers in land, and when its townships were named on July 3, 1790, the surveyor general's office went a little wild with classical names - Pompey, Manlius, Cicero, Marcellus, Cato - and Fabius, for the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus. The names are credited to Robert Harpur, a clerk in that office. Fabius became a town of its own in 1798, split off from Pompey.

🪶 Onondaga Country

Fabius is in Onondaga County, named for the Onondaga Nation, the firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, whose council fire still burns just south of Syracuse. Rowley's OG-NA tomatoes, chief and all, were packed right there in Onondaga County.

🖨️ Karle Litho of Rochester

Down in the corner it reads KARLE LITHO CO. ROCHESTER, N.Y., and a little R-118-30 LG runs up the left edge. Karle Lithographic was printing in Rochester by 1912 - a company letterhead from that year still turns up - in a city that had gone from the Flour City of the Genesee River mills to the Flower City of nurseries and seed houses, and kept a lot of lithographers busy doing it.

The firm goes back a lot further than that letterhead. William Karle, born in Rochester in 1854, started his own lithographic company there in 1879, with Anton Rahn as his first partner - Rahn did the art and Karle did the engraving. That same year Rahn & Karle printed a hand-colored plate of everlasting flowers for Vick's Monthly, put out by James Vick, the Rochester seed seller; The Henry Ford museum has one. In 1918 Karle Lithographic printed a big "For Victory, Buy More Bonds" poster for the war effort, and Dartmouth's Hood Museum of Art keeps one. William Karle's company carried on until 1932, when it merged with Stecher Lithographic, another Rochester label printer.

That plain cream strip in the pictures is the back of a label: the gold embossing presses so deep you can read OG-NA backwards from behind.

Long and narrow, it looks great framed over a kitchen doorway or in a farmhouse pantry. You'll get one like the one shown, never used. The supply is finite - nobody's printing OG-NA tomato labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.