Vintage 1960s-70s Philadelphia Coach and Four 🐎 Sarsaparilla Soda Label

Who Drank Sarsaparilla in Philadelphia? 🐎 Vintage 1960s Coach and Four Sarsaparilla Soda Label

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

Say "sarsaparilla" and half of us picture a dusty cowboy leaning on a saloon bar. This little Philadelphia label is a lot more city than that, but the drink it names has one of the wildest histories on any soda shelf. Great yellow and black colors, that stagecoach, and a story worth telling.

🐎 What's on it

COACH AND FOUR over a black coach-and-four silhouette, Sarsaparilla across the yellow band, and the fine print: "Contains carbonated water, sugar, caramel coloring, artificial sarsaparilla flavoring, preserved with sodium benzoate." Along the foot: "Bottled under authority of Coach and Four Products Co., Phila., Pa. 19140." Plain paper back.

👬 The people behind the stagecoach

COACH AND FOUR first went on soft drinks on June 26, 1956. Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership trading as "Coach 'N Four Products Co.," registered the name with the U.S. Patent Office on January 29, 1957 (trademark No. 640,759), with Harry Labovitz signing as partner. On July 11, 1969 the name and goodwill went to Coach and Four Products Company, the partnership of Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia, ZIP 19140, which is the company named on this label. The mark was renewed in 1977 and lapsed in 1997.

📅 How old is it?

Two clues on the label itself. The five-digit ZIP, 19140, can't predate July 1, 1963, when ZIP codes began. And look at the words "artificial sarsaparilla flavoring." Old-time sarsaparilla leaned on sassafras oil, but on November 30, 1960 the FDA banned safrole and sassafras oil from food after safrole was found to cause cancer. Every American sarsaparilla after that had to get its flavor another way, and this label says so right on its face. Late 1960s into the 1970s.

💊 From "blood purifier" to soda pop

Sarsaparilla started out as medicine. The real thing came from the root of a tropical vine, Smilax, and in the 1800s it was sold by the bottle as a cure for "skin and blood problems." One of the biggest names was Charles Ira Hood, a druggist's son from Chelsea, Vermont, who opened a drug store in Lowell, Massachusetts and started compounding Hood's Sarsaparilla in 1876. His mix had sarsaparilla root, dandelion, gentian, juniper berries and about 18 percent alcohol, and he claimed it purified the blood and helped everything from rheumatism to heart trouble. It sold like crazy. By 1898 his Lowell laboratory had 175,000 square feet of floor space, the largest building in the world devoted to making patent medicine.

Here's the part I love as a paper collector: Hood was a leader in using color lithography for advertising. He printed everything in-house on twenty presses of his own, trade cards, posters, calendars, cookbooks and pamphlets, which is why so much colorful Hood's ephemera still turns up today. A label like this one comes straight out of that tradition of selling a drink with a great-looking piece of printed paper.

Once the medicine claims faded, sarsaparilla settled in as a soft drink, and popular culture did the rest: the parched cowboy asking for a sarsaparilla at the saloon. It's much harder to find in America now, but it's still a big seller across Southeast Asia, as "Sarsi" in the Philippines and Singapore.

🎨 A coach and four

A coach and four is a carriage pulled by four horses and driven four-in-hand by one driver. Philadelphia's own famous one is Thomas Eakins's painting The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (1879 to 1880), in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with the horses posed from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion.

🏡 Display

This one's fun framed in a kitchen, a bar, or a western-themed den, and it looks great with the rest of the Coach and Four flavors as a set.