Very Rare Combo, Antique 1930s Wharton Ginger Ale Labels, Wharton, TX 🍺

Size: 5" x 3 1/2" (large label), 3" x 1 1/4" (strip) ~ Does have some very slight edge wear, see pictures and videos. Never in a frame. They vary a little one to the next.

🏷️ Two Labels, One Bottle

This is a very rare combo with an amazing windmill and Victorian woman in Dutch dress. We likely won't be seeing these ever again. The large label reads WHARTON across the top, then GINGER ALE in big dark blue capitals, and below that DISTRIBUTED BY / WHARTON BOTTLING WORKS / WHARTON, TEXAS. A Dutch woman stands at the left edge in the full traditional kit - bonnet, bodice, long skirt and apron, wooden clogs - and a tower windmill rises out of a cottage garden on the right, sails up, with a railed stage running round it. The strip is simpler: GINGER ALE across the middle, a Dutch woman at each end turned in to face it, no bottler's name at all. This is another label Wayfair sells copies of the large one for $100's of dollars. The strip hasn't been seen in a long time.

🔷 Painted Like Delft Tile

Look behind the lettering - the whole ground of both pieces is a grid of pale blue-green and cream squares, each one slightly uneven, made to look exactly like a wall of Dutch Delftware. The windmill and the two women are drawn in that same blue, as if glazed right onto the tiles. Small and easy to miss at the bottom left of the woman's feet: LEHMANN, with a stock number, A 60. That's Lehmann Printing & Lithographing Company of San Francisco - founded 1911, and for decades one of the biggest label printers in the country, known for selling the same stock designs out of a catalog to bottlers all over the map. The strip carrying no bottler's name at all fits that exactly: this Dutch windmill was a pattern Lehmann sold, and Wharton Bottling Works bought it and dropped their own name into the big label.

🍾 Wharton Bottling Works

This wasn't some name printed on a label and nothing else - it was a real, working bottling plant. Its proprietor, John C. Aschenbeck, held his own federal trademark - the mark "AA," registered May 19, 1908, for non-intoxicating carbonated beverages. He's on record running the works through the Texas Dairy and Food Commissioner's bottler lists in 1919 and 1920, and the trade press has him there for a solid two decades: a contribution to a 1907 bottlers' trade book, a listing in a 1924 roundup of Texas bottlers, and in 1927 the works was buying a brand-new bottle cleaning machine - not the moves of an outfit about to close its doors.

🤠 Wharton, Texas

Wharton sits on the east bank of the lower Colorado River, about forty-five miles up from the Gulf of Mexico, and it's the seat of Wharton County. It was first settled in 1846 by colonists from Stephen F. Austin's own colony, got its post office in 1847, and takes its name from two brothers, John and William Wharton, who were leaders in the fight for Texas independence. It was a working farm town - potatoes, cotton, corn, rice and sugar cane, cattle, molasses and sugar - and the railroads that came through in 1881 and 1899 grew it from a couple hundred people to better than four thousand by 1940. By then Wharton had a cotton oil mill, a sugar cane factory, gristmills, gins, a dairy - and an ice plant, which is the part that actually matters here. No ice, no cold drink, no bottling business. Ginger ale was a serious product in Texas by then, too - Robert Lazenby had a War Department contract to ship his Circle A Ginger Ale to servicemen overseas back in 1898, and Dublin, Texas is famous as the place that started bottling Dr Pepper in 1891.

Wharton has thrown a couple of names into American culture, too - screenwriter Horton Foote, who won the Pulitzer for Drama and two Oscars, and newsman Dan Rather, were both born there.