Vintage 1940s Orphan Boy Smoking Tobacco Label 🫏 John Weisert Tob. Co. St. Louis MO Fine Carolina NOS

Who Was the Underdog Mule of St. Louis? 🫏 A Vintage 1940s Orphan Boy Smoking Tobacco Label, Weisert of St. Louis

Size: 2 1/2" x 1 5/8"

A little unused tobacco label: ORPHAN BOY arched across a red banner over a brown mule standing by a log tobacco barn, then SMOKING TOBACCO. with a big ornamental T, FINE CAROLINA, and MADE BY JOHN WEISERT TOB. CO. ST. LOUIS, MO. At the very bottom is a tiny oval union bug from the Allied Printing Trades Union Label Council of St. Louis, which tells you it came off a union press in town. The back is blank. A seller who has handled plenty of them says they were made for Orphan Boy's cloth tobacco bags, and the dealers who carry this same unused stock put it in the 1940s.

The name is a lot older than this printing. Orphan Boy was already on Weisert's list of union-made brands in 1909, and in January 1911 the company named Orphan Boy granulated among its leading brands, right alongside Pike, Granulated 54, Harp, Big John plug cut and its 93 cigar clippings. In 1915 a Weisert man was out introducing it in Cincinnati. A brand that was still being printed a generation later was a brand people kept asking for.

🫏 The legend of the mule himself

Here's the story the way it has been passed down in tobacciana circles. The legend holds that Orphan Boy was named for an actual Missouri-bred jack - a male donkey - who became something of a local sensation when he swept the mule competitions at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, the great Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The story goes that this animal came up without the pedigree and formal backing his rivals carried into the ring - no fancy bloodline, no deep-pocketed owner behind him - and he won anyway. He was the underdog. He was, as the old-timers told it, the orphan. And a stubborn, proud Missouri mule who beat the odds without a name behind him is exactly the kind of story a tobacco man in a crowded market would want on his brand.

🏭 John Weisert, the Big John tobacco man

The Weiserts had been in tobacco since 1855, when John Weisert, a German immigrant, started out in Virginia. Weisert Brothers was making tobacco in St. Louis by 1880, and in 1902 John Weisert Jr. went out on his own as the John Weisert Tobacco Company.

St. Louis was a tobacco town. At one time it was the biggest chewing tobacco supplier in the world, and until the First World War it turned out something like forty percent of the country's sales - Liggett & Myers, Drummond, Christian Peper, and Weisert. When the Tobacco Trust swallowed most of the independents, the John Weisert Tobacco Company was one of the few that not only survived it but thrived, with more than a hundred brands at one time; Big John was the best known, and folks called the outfit the Big John Tobacco Co.

That factory, at 1120 South Sixth Street, went up in 1903, designed by Anton Rieve, with a warehouse added in 1922 as the business grew. And here's a bit of St. Louis history I can't resist: the ground it stands on was given in 1827 by John Mullanphy, St. Louis' first millionaire, to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart for an orphanage, and the Mullanphy Orphan Asylum, run by Mother Philippine Duchesne, stood there until 1894. So a company with a brand called Orphan Boy made its tobacco where the city's orphans had lived.

Weisert was the last tobacco maker in St. Louis. By the end the founder's grandson was working alone, adding the flavors to the cigars himself, and the company folded in 1989. The building was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 and restored. The black-and-white photos of the Weisert factory at the end of my pictures are there for history only and aren't included; you get the label.

🌾 Fine Carolina

FINE CAROLINA was the selling line: bright leaf from the Carolinas was the smoking tobacco everybody wanted, and putting it on the label told a man at the counter what he was getting. A Missouri mule on a pouch of Carolina leaf, made in a St. Louis factory on an old orphanage lot, printed by a union shop - that's a lot of America on a label not three inches tall.

🫏 About these

Every one I have is unused. Everything I sell is kept in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled, so whatever age a piece shows, it had before it came to me. Frame one for a St. Louis wall, a pipe smoker, a mule man, or a shadow box with an old tobacco tin. The supply is finite - Weisert has been gone since 1989, nobody's printing Orphan Boy labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.