Vintage 1960s Union Workman Tobacco Wrapper Label 🌿 Scotten Dillon Co Detroit NOS Burley Long Cut

How Old Is a Union Workman Tobacco Wrapper, Really? 🌿 A 1960s Scotten, Dillon Co. Burley Bag Wrapper From Detroit

Size: 12 1/4" x 4 1/4"

This is the whole printed wrapper for a 2 ounce bag of Union Workman tobacco, laid out flat the way it came off the press and never folded into a bag. Up top, UNION WORKMAN in an ornate black frame, a green BURLEY TOBACCO panel, SWEET LONG CUT and Smoke or Chew, and NET WEIGHT 2 OZ.; down the sides, SWEET CHEW on one and PLEASANT SMOKE on the other. The lower flap carries the maker, SCOTTEN, DILLON CO., DETROIT, MICH., a tiny PERMIT TP-1-MICH., and the union label - Issued by Authority of the TOBACCO WORKERS INTERNATIONAL UNION, UNION MADE. The white strips are the unprinted seams where the glue went. That bright yellow is hard to miss from across a store.

📅 The little line that dates it

The Detroit Historical Society has this same wrapper in its collection and catalogs it as about 1910, and I had it in the early part of the century too. But look at that small print on the bottom flap: PERMIT TP-1-MICH. That's a federal tobacco-products permit number, and Washington only started issuing permits to tobacco manufacturers with the Excise Tax Technical Changes Act of 1958. Before that, tobacco packages identified the factory by number and tax district and wore a revenue stamp; the stamps ended in June 1959, and from then on every package carried the maker's mark instead - its name and town, or its permit number. The museum's own copy has the same permit line on it. So this wrapper was printed in 1959 or later, which makes it a 1960s piece rather than a 1910 one.

🏭 Scotten, Dillon of Detroit

Daniel Scotten learned the tobacco trade in Detroit in the early 1850s - the Smithsonian has him starting as an apprentice to the cigar maker Isaac Miller. Detroit was a real tobacco town then, turning out 210 million cigars and 14 million pounds of chewing tobacco a year, and tobacco gave more than 10,000 people a job, most of them women. In 1856 Scotten went in with Hiram Granger and a partner named Lovett (the sources split on William C. or George) to run the Hiawatha Tobacco Factory in Springwells. By 1882 it was all his, as the Daniel Scotten Company, and in the late 1880s he moved into a bigger factory and renamed it Scotten-Dillon to mark a corporate partner. By the 1890s it had 1,200 workers and $4 million a year in sales.

In 1898 the company became a branch of Continental Tobacco, which was mostly owned by James B. Duke's American Tobacco, and the Conwood Corporation took it over in later years. Chewing tobacco was its biggest seller - Oceanic Cut Plug, named for the White Star liner, Snow Shoe, Long Distance, and Union Workman among them. The Detroit Historical Society also keeps a white, red and blue foil-lined Union Workman Chewing Tobacco bag from around 1940.

🤝 Union made, union named

The union label on the bottom flap is the real thing. The Tobacco Workers International Union was organized in 1895, and its label on a package meant the people who made and packed the tobacco carried union cards; in 1978 the union merged with the bakery and confectionery workers into the union that still represents tobacco workers today. The story passed around in tobacciana circles is that the Union Workman name was aimed square at the man who punched a time clock and paid his dues, and the old rumor goes that some chewers picked it over other brands because the name alone read like an endorsement. With that union label right on the bag, Scotten, Dillon backed the name up.

🌿 Smoke or chew

Burley is the light, air-cured leaf grown mostly in Kentucky and Tennessee, and it takes a sweetening well, which is where the SWEET comes from. Long cut means long shreds, loose enough to pack a pipe or tuck in your cheek, so one 2 ounce bag covered a man either way - SWEET CHEW on one side, PLEASANT SMOKE on the other. Collectors of tobacco paper also like to tell how the commercial artists who drew wrappers like this worked for the printing houses on piece rates, uncredited, and their names never made it onto the work - only the work survives.

📦 About these wrappers

Every one I have is this same flat yellow wrapper, unused and never made up into a bag, 12 1/4 by 4 1/4 inches. Framed flat it's a great strip of bold yellow-and-black graphics for a den, a shop or a garage, and it's a natural for anybody from Detroit, anybody from a union family, or anybody who ever kept a pouch of chew in his back pocket. The supply is finite - nobody is printing Union Workman bags for Scotten, Dillon anymore, and once these last flat, unused wrappers are framed and hanging on walls, they'll be very difficult to acquire.