Vintage 1960s Stage Coach and Four Ginger Ale Soda Beverage Label 🥤 Philadelphia, PA

Remember Everyday Ginger Ale? 🥤 Vintage 1960s Stage Coach and Four Ginger Ale Label, Philadelphia, PA

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

This label is becoming uncommon now and is very collectible. Really cool stagecoach and colors! Ginger ale was the everyday workhorse of the whole Coach and Four line, and it has a family tree that runs from Belfast to Toronto to Detroit before it ever reached this Philadelphia label.

🐎 What's on it

A small paper bottle label for Coach and Four Ginger Ale in deep brown, bright green and gold. Across the top, COACH AND FOUR ® in cream letters. Through the middle, a bright green band between two thin gold rules, and on it a black silhouette of a coachman driving four horses at full gallop. Then Ginger Ale in a big cream script with a little star at the front, and the fine print: "Caramel colored. Bottled under authority of Coach and Four Products Co., Phila., Pa. 19117." The back is plain paper. It's New Old Stock, printed and never pasted on a bottle.

👬 The people behind the stagecoach

The name COACH AND FOUR went on soft drinks for the first time on June 26, 1956, and a month later it was filed with the U.S. Patent Office by Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership doing business as "Coach 'N Four Products Co." It was registered on January 29, 1957 as trademark No. 640,759, for "maltless soft drinks and carbonated waters." That's the little ® on the label. Signing for Sheffield, as a partner, was Harry Labovitz.

On July 11, 1969, Sheffield handed the name and all its goodwill to a new partnership, Coach and Four Products Company, made up of Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz, on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia. That is the exact company name printed on this label. The trademark was renewed in 1977 and finally lapsed in 1997, forty-one years after that first bottle in 1956.

"Bottled under authority of" is franchise talk: the company owned the name and the recipes, and the bottles were filled and capped under its label. The Coach and Four line ran to ginger ale, ginger beer, tonic water, bitter lemon, club soda, sarsaparilla and black raspberry, a full lineup of mixers for a Philadelphia bar or a family's basement fridge.

📅 How old is it?

That five-digit ZIP, 19117, can't be earlier than July 1, 1963, the day ZIP codes began. And 19117 isn't in the city itself: it's Elkins Park, just over Philadelphia's northern line in Cheltenham Township, Montgomery County, even though the label still says "Phila." Other Coach and Four flavors print 19140, North Philadelphia, where the 1969 partnership was on North 6th Street, so the company printed labels from two addresses over the years. With the 1969 company name on it, this is a late 1960s into 1970s piece, true vintage Philadelphia soda history.

🐴 What collectors pass along

Every little brand like this picks up a story or two. The one collectors tell about Coach and Four is that these labels came to light as a warehouse lot, a cache of unused stock that sat undisturbed for decades before it reached the paper-antiques world, which is why they turn up new and never used. And local legend has it that Coach and Four was one of several small Philadelphia-area soda makers that did well for a while, when a neighborhood brand could still hold its own against the national giants, and then faded out as the grocery chains took over the shelf space. Nobody has written that history down, but it fits what the paper trail shows: a family partnership, a trademark that ran from 1956 to 1997, and a lineup of flavors people remember.

🫚 Golden or dry? The ginger ale family tree

Ginger ale comes in two styles, and they come from two different men. The first ginger ale came out of Belfast, Ireland, in the 1850s, from Thomas Joseph Cantrell, an Irish apothecary and surgeon, and his was the golden style: darker and stronger on the ginger. Cantrell's name lived on in the Dublin firm of Cantrell & Cochrane, the same company that gave the world the name "club soda."

The second style came from Canada. John McLaughlin, who had opened a soda water bottling plant in Toronto in 1890, began working on flavor extracts in 1904 and that year introduced a "Pale Dry" ginger ale, paler and much milder on the ginger. He registered the Canada Dry name in 1907, and the pale style's big break came in the States during Prohibition, when its clean taste was just the thing for hiding the flavor of homemade liquor. Meanwhile Detroit had Vernors, a golden ginger ale aged in oak barrels, dating to 1866 and counted as one of the very first American soft drinks.

Coach and Four's says "Caramel colored" right on the label, so it poured a deeper amber than an uncolored pale ginger ale. And whatever the style, ginger ale has always pulled double duty: a mixer for the highball and the holiday punch, and the old family remedy for an upset stomach.

🎨 A coach and four

A coach and four is a carriage drawn by four horses, all four driven "four-in-hand" by one driver holding every rein. Philadelphia has the most famous one in American art. Around 1879 to 1880, Fairman Rogers, a Philadelphia engineer and devoted coachman, had Thomas Eakins paint him driving a coaching party through Fairmount Park. The painting, The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand, hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Eakins posed its horses from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion, which makes it one of the first paintings to show exactly how horses move. A Philadelphia soda company choosing a coach and four for its label was picking one of the city's own great images.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That brown and bright green look great with a wide mat in either color, it's right at home on a bar cart or in a dining room, and it pairs up nicely with the rest of the Coach and Four flavors if you want the whole set together.