Antique Corona Toilet Soap Label 🧼 (1920s-50s) | Manhattan Soap Co. New York

Who Made Corona Toilet Soap? 🧼 Antique Label, 1920s-50s, Manhattan Soap Co., New York

Size: 5 1/2" x 3 3/4"

👑 A gold crown over a deep purple cartouche edged in gold, with CORONA in tall Art Deco letters and a little white star, on cream paper with the bottom corners clipped. It's an unused Corona Toilet Soap label from the Manhattan Soap Co., the Sweetheart soap people, and I haven't come across another one out there.

🔍 What's On It

CORONA, TOILET SOAP, and along the bottom MANHATTAN SOAP CO., INC., NEW YORK. That's every word on it. There's no printer's line, no date and no number, and the back is blank.

That little "INC." is what dates it. The company signed itself plain "Manhattan Soap Co." for decades, right through a filing in November 1922, and the first "Manhattan Soap Company, Inc." turns up in November 1923. Purex bought the company in July 1956. So this label comes from somewhere between the mid-1920s and the 1950s, and the Art Deco lettering fits the early part of that.

🧼 Frank Burke and the Manhattan Soap Co.

The company was Frank Gaius Burke's. He raised sheep in North Dakota and cattle in Texas before he came to New York in 1888 and went into soap, with his first factory up on 150th Street. His best-known soap was Sweetheart, which the company pushed with coupon campaigns in the 1910s, and he had Garden Bouquet, Coaline and Blu-White bluing too. In 1899 the firm even made an "Our Hero" toilet soap moulded as a bust of Admiral Dewey for the Dewey Day celebrations. In 1925 the company moved its works into the old World War I Harriman shipyard building at Bristol, Pennsylvania, the same building that later made Dial soap. Burke died in 1929, his sons kept it going, and in 1956 it went to Purex.

Corona itself was Burke's own brand. He filed for the CORONA trademark for toilet soaps in 1921, saying he'd used it since 1907 on a Corona Witch-Hazel Soap, and it was registered in December 1922 and renewed in 1942 in the name of Manhattan Soap Company, Inc. A 1942 trade listing still names "Sweetheart, Corona and Garden Bouquet toilet soaps." Corona is Latin for crown, which is why that crown sits right on top.

📏 Details

• Antique Corona Toilet Soap label, gold crown and purple cartouche, Art Deco lettering
• Manhattan Soap Co., Inc., New York
• Cream paper, clipped corners, about 5 1/2" x 3 3/4", unused, New Old Stock
• You'll get one label like the ones shown

🖼️ It's a pretty little thing framed in a bathroom or a powder room, or added to a collection of old soap and drugstore packaging.