Antique Brick's Old Homestead Mince Meat Labels 🏡 Edgar Brick & Sons Crosswicks NJ 1910s-1930s Litho Set NOS

🏡 What Was America Putting On The Holiday Table Before Mince Pie Came In A Box?

Long before mincemeat meant a jar from the supermarket shelf, it meant a name a family trusted — and in a great many New Jersey kitchens that name was Brick's Old Homestead. This set gathers three genuine period labels from that brand, all printed for Edgar Brick & Sons of Crosswicks, New Jersey: a large rectangular container label, a round jar label, and a plain typeset ingredient card. Together they tell the whole small story of how one Burlington County packing house dressed its most famous product, from the showpiece farm scene down to the fine print. At Vintage and Antique Gifts we keep sets like this intact because three labels that traveled together say far more than any one of them could alone.

Each is New Old Stock — unused, never put into service, printed in bright chromolithographed color on paper. The two illustrated labels share the same warm pastoral vignette: a red-roofed farmhouse and barn, a windmill turning over green fields, cattle at the fence line, all framed in the cream, navy, red, green, and yellow of classic early American grocery art. The third piece, the little ingredient card, is pure honest typography. This is a flagship-worthy trio of American advertising, and it deserves the full telling.

🧾 What Exactly Is In The Set

The three pieces are enumerated plainly, because a buyer should know precisely what a set contains:

• 🌾 The large rectangular label — the showpiece. "Brick's Old Homestead" sweeps across the top in deep navy script; the farm vignette sits at the center; "MINCE MEAT" reads bold beneath it over the motto "Consistently Superior Since 1874"; the ingredient line and the maker's credit — "Prepared by Edgar Brick & Sons, Crosswicks, N.J." — close it out in red. It carries the period preservative disclosure, "prepared with 1-10 of 1% benzoate of soda."
• 🥣 The round jar label — the same homestead scene set in an oval, with "BRICK'S Old Homestead" above and "MINCE MEAT" on a blue banner below. Its text adds the kitchen instruction "Add 3/4 cup water to contents of jar," the net weight "1 lb. 1 oz.," and the credit "Edgar Brick & Sons - Manufacturer - Crosswicks, N.J."
• 📇 The ingredient card — a plain, bordered typeset card: "Old Homestead Mince Meat is composed of Apples, Sugar, Raisins, Currants, Candied Peels, Beef, Cane Syrup, Spices, Salt and Brandy," signed off "Edgar Brick & Sons, Crosswicks, N.J."

Read the ingredient lines and you can practically smell the season: apples, sugar, raisins, currants, candied peels, beef, cane syrup, spices, salt — and brandy. This was the real, old-fashioned mincemeat, the kind that filled the pie at the center of an American Thanksgiving and Christmas table for generations.

👨‍🌾 The Man Who Was Not Satisfied With Store-Bought

The story begins with Edgar Brick, who moved to Crosswicks, New Jersey in the 1850s with his wife Susan and opened a general store on Main Street. He sold, among many things, mincemeat trucked in from Philadelphia — and he did not think much of it. So in 1874 he started making his own. That first year he sold seventy-six pounds of it. It was better, word spread, and demand did the rest.

Within five years he had outgrown his quarters. In one of the more charming episodes of the tale, he bought two farmhouses and had them physically relocated to his factory site to keep up. By the turn of the twentieth century Edgar Brick & Sons had become the largest mincemeat manufacturer in the state of New Jersey. When Edgar died in 1920, the business passed to his three sons — Arthur, Josiah, and Charles — and it kept climbing. At its wartime peak in the 1940s the firm employed some forty workers and turned out around three million pounds of mincemeat a year, which made it, by that measure, the largest mincemeat maker in the entire United States. That is the founding the label commemorates when it says "Consistently Superior Since 1874" — a heritage badge for the company's origin, not a claim about when these particular labels rolled off the press.

🗓️ Reading The Real Date In The Fine Print

So when were these labels actually printed? The honest answer lives in their own details rather than in the 1874 motto. The disclosure "prepared with 1-10 of 1% benzoate of soda" is a tell: openly naming benzoate of soda as a preservative was a labeling convention of the Pure Food and Drug Act era, which reshaped American packaging from 1906 onward. Pair that with the flat chromolithographed color separation, the cursive script logo set against a bold sans-serif product name, and the general look of the artwork, and these labels sit comfortably in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Dealers and archivists most commonly place Old Homestead labels in the 1910s through 1930s range, and that is exactly how we frame this set. The company itself made mincemeat under the Old Homestead name from 1874 all the way into the 1960s, so the brand long outlived any single print run — the labels are a slice of that long middle chapter, not of its 1874 beginning.

🍷 Prohibition, Brandy, And A Very Convenient Court Ruling

Read the ingredients again and one word jumps out for anyone who knows the era: brandy. Mincemeat was traditionally laced with liquor, and the brand's own history brushes right up against Prohibition. Collector lore — offered here as the story that circulates, rather than as documented fact — holds that Edgar Brick & Sons leaned into real spirits in their recipes and that their labels have been treasured as "Prohibition relics." The wider history is genuinely colorful: almost as soon as national Prohibition took effect in 1920, cooks and manufacturers pushed for culinary exemptions, and the story goes that a 1922 court decision held that culinary products — mincemeat expressly among them — could contain liquor. The Brick firm's own line under other brand names carried a Federal Prohibition Permit and openly stated a small proof of alcohol, which confirms the family was navigating those dry years in the kitchen aisle. A label that lists brandy in plain sight is a small, delicious artifact of that peculiarly American negotiation between the law and the holiday pie.

🏘️ Crosswicks: A Very Small Town With A Very Big Pie

Crosswicks is a tiny village in Chesterfield Township, Burlington County, New Jersey — the kind of quiet crossroads most maps barely pause on. It is a wonderful thing that a place that small produced, for a stretch of years, the largest mincemeat operation in the country. Local lore holds that the Brick family loomed large in the life of the township well beyond the factory: they are credited in passed-down accounts with helping bring electricity to Crosswicks, with running a mill and an ice plant along Crosswicks Creek, and even with a hand in founding the Chesterfield Township Historical Society. Whether every detail is exact or burnished by retelling, the shape of it is clear — a family business that was, for generations, the beating economic and civic heart of a small New Jersey village. These labels are a piece of that local history you can hold.

🏗️ Why We Keep A Set Like This Together

Single old labels are wonderful; a matched set is a document. Here you have the container label, the jar label, and the ingredient card — the full graphic identity of one product, from one packer, in one town, preserved unused. That is how a local historical society would want it kept, and it is why we resist breaking sets like this apart. This is an excellent example of early American food-advertising art and small-town industrial history, and it earns its place as the flagship telling.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🖼️ Frame all three together in a single mat — rectangular label, round jar label, and ingredient card — as a complete brand study for a kitchen or dining wall.
• 📍 Give a farmhouse or country kitchen an authentic period centerpiece with that warm homestead-and-windmill scene.
• 🥧 Hang the set near the holiday baking corner as a nod to the mince pies of Thanksgivings and Christmases past.
• 🏡 Pair them with other New Jersey or Burlington County ephemera for a local-history vignette.
• 🎁 Mat and frame a single favorite as a warm, unexpected gift for a baker, a New Jersey native, or a collector of old advertising.

🎁 Who Collects These

Advertising and label collectors chase early food ephemera like this for its chromolithographed artistry. New Jersey and local-history collectors want anything tied to Crosswicks and the Brick family. Prohibition-history buffs love a brandy-listing food label. Farmhouse and country decorators frame them for the pastoral scene, and holiday-nostalgia lovers keep them for the mince-pie memory. As a matched, unused set, this piece appeals across every one of those crowds at once.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🤔 Are these original labels or reproductions?

They are original period labels, printed in chromolithographed color on paper for Edgar Brick & Sons, and preserved unused as New Old Stock.

🗓️ Does "Since 1874" mean the labels are from 1874?

No — 1874 is the company's founding year, printed as a heritage motto. The labels themselves, judged by their benzoate-of-soda disclosure and chromolitho style, date to the 1910s–1930s.

🧾 How many pieces come in the set?

Three: the large rectangular label, the round jar label, and the plain typeset ingredient card — all from the same Old Homestead brand and the same Crosswicks packer.

🍷 Why does the ingredient list include brandy?

Traditional mincemeat was made with liquor. The brand's history runs right through the Prohibition years, when culinary products were ultimately permitted to contain spirits — which is part of what makes these labels such fun artifacts of the era.

📏 How big are the labels?

The Old Homestead container labels are documented at about 9.5 by 5 inches; the round jar label and ingredient card are smaller companion pieces to it.

🌟 What condition are they in?

New Old Stock — unused labels in bright printed color, preserved from the packer's own leftover stock rather than soaked off a used jar.