Everything authentic. Nothing reproduced. 🏛️ Vintage and Antique Gifts is a multi-channel...
Preserving History: Authentic Objects Across Eras
Vintage and Antique Gifts
Couldn't load pickup availability
In 1874 a Crosswicks shopkeeper named Edgar Brick got tired of the Philadelphia mincemeat he was selling and made his own. He sold 76 pounds that first year. By World War II his family's factory, built out of two farmhouses dragged together, was turning out three million pounds a year, more mincemeat than any other company in the United States. Today the factory stands empty on Preservation New Jersey's list of the state's most endangered historic places, and sections of its roof have fallen in.
This is one of the firm's labels for Old Homestead Mince Meat: printed by letterpress, never pasted onto a container, and still carrying the recipe in plain type, beef, brandy and all.
There is no picture on it, no color and no slogan. The headline runs in bold serif capitals, the ingredient sentence sits below in a clean roman face, and the firm name and town share the bottom line. Turn it over and you can read the label backwards in relief: the type was pressed hard enough into the card to push every letter and the border through to the back. That raised ghost is the signature of letterpress, where inked metal type is driven into paper, rather than a flat print laid on top.
Edgar Brick and his wife, Susan, came to Crosswicks and opened a general store on Main Street. Like every grocer around, he stocked mincemeat made in Philadelphia, and he did not think much of it. In 1874 he started making his own. After five years of rising sales he needed a bigger building, so in 1879 he bought two farmhouses, moved them to a new site and joined them into one factory.
By the turn of the 20th century, Edgar Brick & Sons was the largest mincemeat maker in New Jersey. Edgar Brick & Sons sold its mincemeat under several brand names, among them Old Homestead, Nonpareil and Banquet Hall, each with its own label. Edgar died in 1920, and his three sons, Arthur, Josiah and Charles, took over. Brick family members ran the business for the rest of its life. Its peak came during World War II, when 40 workers in that joined-farmhouse factory produced the three million pounds a year that made Brick's the top mincemeat manufacturer in America.
Tastes changed. Mincemeat started losing its place on the holiday table in the 1960s, and in 1968 the company quit making it and switched to alcoholic beverages. It closed in 1979. The Hamilton Uniform Company later used the building. Now it is vacant, deemed a safety hazard by Chesterfield Township, and threatened by what preservationists call demolition by neglect. The factory stands in the Crosswicks Village Historic District, which is listed on both the National and State Registers.
The Bricks shaped the village as much as the factory did. The family was instrumental in bringing electricity to Crosswicks, set up a mill and an ice plant along Crosswicks Creek, and helped form the Chesterfield Township Historical Society. When the Crosswicks Community Association was proposed in April 1919, its first committee included Josiah E. Brick, Charles W. Brick and Mrs. Charles W. Brick, and it chose Josiah Brick as chairman; the association was incorporated that October.
Brandy was not a garnish in mincemeat. It flavored the fruit and helped keep it. That became a legal problem in 1920, when national Prohibition made making and selling liquor a federal crime. Food makers pressed for their traditional recipes to be spared, and in 1922 a court case ruled that culinary products, mincemeat included, could contain liquor.
Brick's put that ruling to work. A label for the firm's Banquet Hall brand carries the line PROOF ALCOHOL BY VOLUME 14 PER CENT and a FEDERAL PROHIBITION PERMIT N.J. H-926. The Old Homestead label here prints no permit number and no proof. It simply lists Brandy last, after Salt, where every customer could see it.
Mincemeat is older than America by a long way. Mince pies in English cooking seem to date back to the 12th century and the Crusades, when spices from the Middle East and the habit of mixing sweet with savory came home to England. Early recipes were full of real meat: boiled pork, stewed bird and rabbit, eggs, cheese, sugar, saffron and spice. The pies became a Christmas dish, eaten through the twelve days of the season, and the meat only began to drop out of recipes in the Victorian era. The beef on this label is a leftover of that long tradition.
Every December a legend makes the rounds that Oliver Cromwell banned mince pies, and that eating one on Christmas Day is still against the law in England. No such law survives. What did happen is that the Puritan parliament of the 1640s and 1650s cracked down on Christmas itself, feasting included, and the mince pie, rich with meat and suet, was exactly the kind of "gluttonous" treat that got caught up in it. Over the centuries the story shrank down to the pie.
Crosswicks is a village in Chesterfield Township, Burlington County, 5.7 miles from Trenton and 17 miles from Philadelphia, with 849 people counted in 2020. Its name comes from the Lenape word Crossweeksung, "house of separation." Quakers settled here in 1677 and founded what is now Crosswicks Friends Meeting in 1684. In 1773 they built the brick meeting house that still stands, modeled on the new Buckingham Meeting House in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, at a cost of £3,750.
That meeting house has seen a great deal. In 1756 and 1758 the colonial court in Trenton held two councils there to decide the fate of the Lenape, and the second one created the first reservations, in what is now Shamong Township. During the Revolution soldiers from both sides were quartered in it, on the understanding that they would leave the room free for Quaker worship on Sunday.
On June 23, 1778, five days before the Battle of Monmouth, American troops under Philemon Dickinson and William Maxwell skirmished here to slow General Henry Clinton's British army as it marched across New Jersey. Three cannonballs hit the meeting house. One struck the brick wall and left a dent, and the ball was saved and later mortared back into the wall at that very spot, where visitors can still see it.
The village also has a library, established in 1817 to serve the township, and it is still open.
The Brick name stayed tied to Crosswicks history long after the mincemeat stopped. Gertrude N. Brick (1905–1995), a genealogist and antiquarian, was a founder and life trustee of the Chesterfield Township Historical Society and chaired the township's Tercentenary Committee. She helped save the early 18th-century Singleton-Lathem-Large House, served as president of the YWCA of Burlington County, and was involved in forming the Fort Dix Community Service during World War II. Her papers, running from 1763 to 1984, are preserved at Rutgers University.
A village grocer turned a complaint about Philadelphia mincemeat into the biggest mincemeat business in the country, his family helped light up Crosswicks, and the firm left behind a factory that is now falling apart. Most of what Brick's printed went onto pails and jars and into the trash. This label went nowhere, so the recipe, the brandy, the family name and the town are all still here in black and cream, the size of a playing card cut short.
Who made Old Homestead Mince Meat?
Edgar Brick & Sons of Crosswicks, New Jersey, a family firm that began making mincemeat in 1874.
How big was Brick's?
At its World War II peak it employed 40 people and was the largest mincemeat manufacturer in the United States.
Why does a mincemeat label list brandy?
Brandy was part of the traditional recipe. After Prohibition began, a 1922 court case allowed culinary products such as mincemeat to contain liquor, and Brick's operated under federal permit N.J. H-926.
Is there really beef in it?
Yes. Beef is printed right in the ingredient list, a holdover from centuries of mince pies made with real meat.
How can you tell it is letterpress?
The type is pressed so deeply that the entire label shows through in raised mirror image on the back.
What size is it?
3 x 2.25 inches.
Does the Brick's factory still stand?
Yes, in Crosswicks, but it is vacant and listed among New Jersey's most endangered historic sites.
Who will want it?
Collectors of food labels and grocery ephemera, New Jersey and Burlington County history lovers, letterpress and printing fans, Prohibition collectors, and anyone who still bakes a mince pie at Christmas.
Items from Vetted Pro Collectors
Shipping for items offered by vetted Pro Collectors is determined at checkout. All Pro Collector listings are reviewed to ensure fair, reasonable shipping practices.
For full details, please refer to our Shipping Policy.
Take your time — you've got a full six months. If a piece isn't right for you, send it back the way it reached you and we're good.
In the first 30 days your money goes straight back the way you paid. After that it's store credit, so you can put it toward something you'd rather have.
Return shipping we sort out between us, case by case. I don't make this difficult.
If something arrives damaged, or it isn't what I said it was, send me a photo within 48 hours and I'll make it right.
Email info@vintageantiquesgifts.com or call 802-356-9872 — that's me answering, not a call center.
The only things I can't take back are custom or special-order pieces and gift cards.
