Vintage 1940s Pike Smoking Tobacco Label 🏷️ John Weisert Tobacco Co. St. Louis MO NOS Advertising Art

Pike Smoking Tobacco Label 🏷️ John Weisert Tobacco Co., St. Louis, Missouri

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

Little but loud: PIKE in big red letters inside a golden oval, sunburst rays all the way around it, a curl of Art Nouveau scrollwork underneath, and then Smoking Tobacco - MADE BY - John Weisert Tobacco Co. - ST. LOUIS, MO. in gold on brick red. Down at the very bottom is a tiny printers' emblem with an 8 beside it, shaped like the printing trades' union label. Never used, plain tan back. I have a stack of these, so yours will look just like this one.

🎡 A Tobacco Born at the World's Fair

Pike goes way back. A 1972 note in the Missouri Historical Society's Bulletin calls it a smoking tobacco "of World's Fair vintage" - its little cardboard poster showed the entrance to the Irish Village at the 1904 Fair - the Louisiana Purchase Exposition -, crowded with pipe smokers. The Irish Village stood on The Pike, the Fair's famous midway, and I'd bet a nickel that's where the name came from.

And it kept going. In 1909 Pike was on the union list of Weisert's granulated smoking tobaccos, right alongside Pure Havana, Rod and Gun, Orphan Boy, Jumbo, Honest Pound and Louisiana Perique; in 1911 the company's man at the Philadelphia tobacco show named it among their leading brands, along with Granulated 54, Orphan Boy, Harp and Big John plug cut; in 1915 Pike and 54 were called the firm's "established leaders"; and in 1931 Weisert was still advertising "Pike" Granulated as a union-made tobacco.

🏭 The Last Tobacco Company in St. Louis

St. Louis made about 40 percent of the nation's tobacco until World War I. In 1902 John Weisert Jr. left the family's Weisert Brothers firm on Merchant Street to start the John Weisert Tobacco Co., first on Pine Street, and in 1903 he moved into a five-story red-brown brick factory at 1120 South Sixth Street, where the leaf rode the freight elevator up to the fifth floor for drying and steaming. While the Trust swallowed everybody else, Weisert survived and grew to more than 100 brands, many of them bought from firms that went under.

When Louis Applestein, the last cigar hand-roller in the city, passed away at 83, the cigars ended, and the business dwindled until the founder's grandson, Walter A. Weisert, was the only one left, blending the flavors himself. The doors closed in 1989, and that was St. Louis's last call in tobacco manufacturing. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, with the Weisert name still painted on the brick, and it's offices and lofts today.

Local legend has it that at the height of the tobacco boom the smell of curing leaf hung over certain St. Louis neighborhoods so steadily that longtime residents claimed they could tell which block they were on - and which factory was nearest - by smell alone.

📅 When This One Was Printed

The brand is World's Fair old, but the early pouches said "Blended with Genuine Turkish" and this plain label doesn't. Dealers who have handled this exact design mostly put it in the 1940s, and more than one says their stock came straight out of the old Weisert building.

Most of the artists who drew labels like this were very good but desperate for work, paid very little and never credited. Their names are lost, but their art is right here. The black-and-white picture of the Weisert building is just there for the history - it doesn't come with the label.