Antique Brick's Old Homestead Mince Meat Label 🏡 NOS 1910s - 1930s Oval Farm Scene, Edgar Brick & Sons, Crosswicks NJ

Size: 3.5 x 3 inches

What Does a Century-Old Label That Was Never Used Tell Us About the People Who Made It? 🏡

There is a particular kind of silence that clings to objects that were made with great care and then simply — by some accident of commerce or fate — never put to use. A label printed, counted, bundled, and set aside. The world moved on. Seasons passed. Decades stacked up. And yet here it sits, as vivid and purposeful as the day it came off the press: a small oval of American food packaging history, never applied to a single jar of mince meat, never smeared with filling or steamed in a canning kitchen, never carried home in a market basket. It waited. And now it arrives in your hands carrying every bit of the graphic confidence and quiet regional pride that New Jersey's small food producers wore so naturally in the years between the wars.

That is the particular magic of New Old Stock. Not reproduction. Not a scan. Not a photographic facsimile. The actual artifact — ink, paper, color, and intention — intact across a century.

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🫙 What This Label Is, Exactly

This is an original, unused, New Old Stock (NOS) paper label for Brick's Old Homestead Mince Meat, produced by Edgar Brick and Sons of Crosswicks, New Jersey. Based on its graphic style, printing conventions, and the documented activity of the Brick family enterprise, it dates most confidently to the 1920s — a period when American regional food processors were competing hard for shelf space in general stores, grocery chains, and canning cooperatives up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

The label is oval in format, printed on a cream paper stock in a palette that still commands attention: a strong, clean red; a warm gold that anchors the ornamental cartouche; deep, declarative black lettering; and a bold blue that sweeps across the lower register of the oval like a confident brushstroke. At the top, in black-outlined block capitals, the name BRICK'S announces the brand with the kind of typographic authority that was the signature of well-established regional producers. Below it, in flowing red script with an old-fashioned forward lean, Old Homestead gives the product its identity — a name chosen deliberately to conjure warmth, tradition, and the rural New Jersey landscape the company literally inhabited. And then, large and unambiguous in yellow block letters set hard against that deep blue ground: MINCE MEAT. No frills. No apology. Just the product, stated plainly.

At the center of the composition, nestled between brand name and product declaration, sits a charming illustrated vignette enclosed in a scrolled gold cartouche. It is a farmstead scene: a white clapboard house, a yellow barn with a red roof, a tall windmill rising against a cloud-brushed sky, a split-rail fence, a dirt path curving naturally toward the cluster of buildings, and cattle — the unmistakable promise of a working farm, rendered in the confident, slightly idealized illustrative hand that characterized the best commercial lithography of the era.

Because it is NOS — New Old Stock — this label has never been applied to a product. It left the printer's shop clean and has remained so. The colors read with a brightness that is genuinely remarkable for a printed paper object a century old. It is the kind of piece that makes even seasoned collectors pause.

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🏭 The Company: Edgar Brick & Sons

The story starts with a very specific kind of dissatisfaction. Edgar Brick arrived in Crosswicks in the 1850s with his wife Susan and opened a general store on Main Street. For years the store stocked mincemeat shipped in from Philadelphia — the standard commercial product of the day. Edgar sold it, tasted it, and decided his customers deserved better. In 1874 he made his own. That first year, he sold 76 pounds of it out of the store.

That's the number every honest account of this company returns to, because 76 pounds sold out of a general store in a village most of the state couldn't find on a map is not yet a business — it's a beginning. Within five years demand had outgrown the original setup, so in 1879 the operation moved into a proper factory: built by physically joining two local farmhouses together, which is where "Old Homestead" gets its literal meaning, not just its marketing sentiment. The company kept growing from there. By the peak years of World War II, Edgar Brick and Sons employed forty workers and was producing roughly three million pounds of mincemeat a year — the largest output of any mincemeat manufacturer in the United States, made in a New Jersey village most people drive through without registering they've arrived.

Edgar Brick died in 1920. His three sons — Arthur, Josiah, and Charles — took over and kept the company running at that same scale for decades, through the WWII peak and into the postwar years. By the 1960s, American mincemeat consumption was declining nationally, and in 1968 the company pivoted to producing alcoholic beverages and stopped making mincemeat entirely. It closed for good in 1979 — a 105-year run from a 76-pound first year to the largest mincemeat operation in the country.

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🌾 The Town: Crosswicks, Burlington County, New Jersey

Crosswicks is one of the oldest communities in Burlington County — founded in 1677 by Quaker settlers, making it the oldest of Chesterfield Township's three villages. The name itself survives from the Lenape word Crossweeksung. The village's historic district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, recognized for its significance in architecture, military history, religion, and transportation.

The Crosswicks Creek that runs through the township was a genuine commercial waterway in the region's early history, and the Brick family made direct use of it — establishing a mill and an ice plant along its banks that supported both the mincemeat operation and the broader local economy. The factory building itself, created in 1879 by joining those two farmhouses and expanded over the following decades, still stands in the historic district. After the company closed in 1979, the building was purchased in 1980 by the Hamilton Uniform Company, which operated there for years before eventually closing as well.

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🖨️ The Craft of It: American Commercial Lithography in the 1920s

The quality of this label is not accidental. The 1920s were a high-water mark for American commercial printing, particularly in the food and grocery trade. Chromolithography — the multi-stone, multi-pass process that built color images by layering individual ink impressions — had been refined over the previous half-century into a genuinely sophisticated commercial art form. The results, on the best labels and packaging of the era, rival anything produced by fine art printmakers of the same period.

What you see in this Brick's Old Homestead label is the output of that tradition at a regional level: a printer working for a Burlington County food producer, pulling out full craft for a client who understood that the label was the product's face in the store. The registration of the colors — the way the red, black, gold, and blue sit in clean relationship to one another — speaks to a pressroom that knew what it was doing. The scrolled gold cartouche around the farm vignette, the inline and outline letterforms of the brand name, the script treatment of Old Homestead: these are the choices of a skilled commercial artist, not a journeyman job rushed through on cheap equipment.

NOS examples of labels like this one are particularly valuable to printing historians and graphic design researchers precisely because they have not been through the degradation process that applied labels endure. No moisture. No adhesive bleed. No surface abrasion from handling in a market or a pantry. The colors you see on this label are the colors the printer intended — unmediated by a century of kitchen life.

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🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🪟 Frame it as standalone folk art — the oval format and farm vignette translate beautifully under glass in a simple black or gilded antique frame; it reads as a finished piece of American rural illustration without any further context needed.
• 🧺 Anchor a farmhouse kitchen gallery wall — pair it with other New Jersey or New England food labels, vintage seed packets, and agricultural trade cards for a cohesive tableau that tells a regional story.
• 📚 Mount in an ephemera or scrapbook collection — archival mounting in an acid-free collector's album alongside Burlington County or Crosswicks NJ historical documents, postcards, or maps gives it proper documentary context.
• 🏡 Style in a vintage pantry or farmhouse kitchen display — propped against a row of period canning jars on an open shelf, this label becomes the visual centerpiece of a curated early-twentieth-century domestic scene.
• 🎨 Use it as inspiration reference in a design or illustration studio — the typographic layering, the color palette, and the cartouche illustration are genuine teaching tools for designers working in vintage, heritage, or artisanal aesthetics.
• 🗺️ Feature it in a New Jersey or Burlington County local history collection — alongside maps, photographs, and documents from Crosswicks or Chesterfield Township, this label functions as primary-source material for researchers and enthusiasts alike.

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🎁 Who Collects These

The community drawn to pieces like this Brick's Old Homestead label is broader and more varied than many people expect — and that breadth is a sign of how genuinely rich this category of Americana really is.

Food and grocery ephemera collectors are the natural first audience. This is a niche with deep roots and serious scholarship behind it — people who have spent decades building collections of canning labels, trade cards, tin lithography, and advertising art centered on the American food industry. For them, a NOS label from a documented regional producer in Burlington County, New Jersey is exactly the kind of piece that fills a gap in a collection or anchors a thematic grouping.

New Jersey local history enthusiasts form a second, equally passionate group. Burlington County has an active community of historians, genealogists, and preservationists, and commercial ephemera — the labels, receipts, letterheads, and trade cards that document the actual economic life of a community — is increasingly recognized as primary historical source material. A Brick's Old Homestead label is a small but genuine window into the agricultural commerce of Crosswicks and Chesterfield Township in the 1920s.

Farmhouse and cottage-style decorators have discovered vintage food labels as a design resource that offers authenticity no reproduction can match. The oval format, the farm vignette, the warm color palette — this label was made to be looked at, and it still performs that function beautifully a century later.

Graphic designers and illustrators working in heritage, artisanal, and vintage aesthetics collect original commercial printing from this era as both inspiration and reference. The typographic choices, the illustration style, and the color relationships in a label like this one are direct links to the visual language that modern "vintage-style" design is always trying to invoke — and there is no substitute for the real thing.

Holiday and Americana collectors round out the audience. Mince meat is inextricably linked to the American holiday tradition — to Thanksgiving pies and Christmas baking — and a label this handsome, from a producer this specific and well-documented, carries genuine seasonal resonance for collectors who build their displays around autumn and winter Americana.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

What does "New Old Stock" (NOS) mean for this label, and why does it matter?

New Old Stock — NOS — means that this label left the printer's shop as part of a production run, was stored as inventory or surplus stock, and was never applied to a product or put into commercial use. It has not been subjected to the moisture, adhesive, handling, and environmental exposure that a label applied to a jar of mince meat would have endured. For collectors and display purposes, this matters enormously: the colors are as the printer intended, the paper has not been compromised by adhesive migration or steam, and the surface has not been abraded by a century of kitchen and pantry life. NOS food labels are significantly rarer than applied examples, and their preservation quality makes them the preferred choice for framing, archival collecting, and serious graphic ephemera study. This piece comes to you exactly as it left production — clean, bright, and fully intact.

How do we know this dates to the 1910s - 1930s?

The dating to the 1920s is based on a convergence of evidence: the graphic conventions of the label design (the typeface treatments, the illustrative style of the farm vignette, the color palette and composition), the printing technology reflected in the label's production, and the documented activity of the Edgar Brick and Sons operation in Crosswicks, New Jersey during that period. Commercial food label design underwent significant shifts across the early twentieth century — the 1920s had a distinctive visual character that distinguishes it from both the Victorian-inflected labels of the 1900s-1910s and the streamlined, modernist-influenced labels of the 1930s and 1940s. The Brick's label reads clearly within the 1920s idiom. Dating of paper ephemera from this era without printed date codes is always presented as a best scholarly estimate, and that is what this attribution represents: an honest, well-reasoned assessment based on available evidence.

Is this label rare? How many might have survived?

Regional food producer labels from the 1920s are, as a category, genuinely uncommon in NOS condition. Edgar Brick and Sons was the largest mincemeat manufacturer in the country by its WWII peak, but its distribution was still geographically concentrated in the Mid-Atlantic — meaning far fewer labels in circulation nationally than a coast-to-coast brand, and fewer survivors in any condition. NOS examples are a fraction of that already smaller pool, since most of any label run was actually used in production. This is not a label you will find in every antique mall. None of that changes the fundamental integrity of the piece or its display quality — review all available photographs carefully; they are the most honest description of condition available.

What is mince meat, historically, and why did New Jersey producers make it?

Traditional American mince meat — quite different from what the term sometimes suggests to modern ears — was a preservation food with deep colonial and early American roots. At its most traditional, it was a cooked and preserved mixture of finely chopped cooked beef or venison, beef suet, apples, dried currants or raisins, citrus peel, sugar, and warm spices (cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice), often preserved with cider, brandy, or rum. The combination of cooking, sugar, acid, and alcohol created a product with genuine shelf stability — jarred mince meat could last through a winter and serve as the filling for pies and tarts at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and throughout the cold months when fresh fruit was unavailable. New Jersey was an ideal region for mince meat production because Burlington County and the surrounding area had both strong apple and fruit orchards and active livestock farming — the two primary ingredient streams for the product. Edgar Brick and Sons was essentially converting the region's agricultural surplus into a value-added preserved product with a long pantry life and a reliable holiday market.

Can this be framed, and what framing approach works best?

Yes — and framing is one of the most rewarding things you can do with a piece like this. The oval format of the Brick's label is actually an asset in framing: it works beautifully centered on a rectangular mat, where the negative mat space frames the oval naturally and gives the piece room to breathe. A simple black frame with a cream or warm white mat echoes the label's own color relationships. A gilded or antique gold frame plays beautifully against the label's gold cartouche and warm palette. For archival safety, always use UV-protective glazing (conservation-grade glass or acrylic) and an acid-free mat board — both will protect the paper from light degradation and acid migration over time. This label was designed to be looked at. It rewards the attention.

Is this piece appropriate for a serious paper ephemera or Americana collection?

Unambiguously yes. This label is documented (we know the producer, the town, the product, and the era), regionally specific (Crosswicks, New Jersey and Burlington County are real, researchable places, not generic placeholders), NOS (genuinely superior preservation condition to an applied example), and graphically distinguished (the oval format, the farm vignette in the scrolled cartouche, the layered typography, the confident color palette all place it well above the middle of its category). For a collector building a serious collection of American food ephemera, New Jersey regional Americana, or 1920s commercial printing, this is a piece with real merit and real staying power.