Vintage 1960s Van Camp's Bean Hole Beans Label 🌲 Lumberjack & Canoe North Woods Art NOS 9.5 x 4.5

Size: 9.5 x 4.5 inches ~ New old stock, never applied to a can. They vary a little one to the next.

🌲 Lumberjacks, a canoe, and a can of beans

This is a full wrap-around can label for Stokely Van Camp's Bean Hole Beans, and it might be the most fun piece of grocery art I've had come through the shop. On the left, two lumberjacks in red shirts stand on planks at the foot of an enormous tree, axes swinging and a big notch already chopped out of it, with a whole forest behind them. On the right, two men paddle a red canoe through a stretch of whitewater, rocks breaking the current at the bow. Between them, printed on an illustrated curl of birch bark, is the brand itself: Stokely, Van Camp's (marked Trade Mark, Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.), Bean Hole Beans®, With Pork and Molasses Sauce, and Distributed by Stokely-Van Camp, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana 46206 — Net Wt. 15½ Ozs. A white roundel says “Heat… Eat… Enjoy,” and a red one makes the pitch: “A North Woods Recipe — Good As All Outdoors.”

🔥 What a bean hole actually is

The name isn't a marketing flourish. A bean hole is a pit dug in the ground and lined with stone; you burn a fire down in it until you've got a deep bed of coals, then lower in a heavy cast-iron pot of beans — soaked, sweetened with molasses, layered with salt pork — cover it over, and leave it to cook underground overnight. It's a Penobscot tradition, and by the nineteenth century it had become about the most important single food in Maine's logging camps; the bigger camps even built the bean hole its own lean-to. It's still going, too — people dig one every year at the Common Ground Fair and at the Maine Forest and Logging Museum, and Maine churches, granges and towns still put on bean-hole bean suppers.

🏭 An Indianapolis company, twice over

Van Camp's is one of the old names in canned pork and beans. Gilbert Van Camp, a tinsmith, ran an Indianapolis grocery with his wife Hester and started canning fruits and vegetables there in 1861. The company's own story goes that he landed an Army contract and fed Union soldiers canned pork and beans in the Civil War. What's on paper is 1882, when Gilbert and his son Cortland started the Van Camp Packing Company — the year the company later gave the Patent Office for its beans first going on sale — and by 1929 Van Camp's was running magazine ads for Bean Hole Beans “from the fragrant woods of Maine.” In 1933, in the middle of the Depression, brothers James and John Stokely bought the company, and it became Stokely-Van Camp, Inc. — the name printed right here on the birch bark. And here's the part that surprises people: in 1967 that same Stokely-Van Camp bought the rights to a drink a University of Florida doctor, Robert Cade, had cooked up for the Gators football team — Gatorade. So the company selling these woodsy beans was putting Gatorade on the map in the very same years. Quaker Oats bought the company in 1983, and Van Camp's itself moved on to ConAgra in 1995.

🕰️ How I'd date this one

No year is printed on it, but the label dates itself if you know where to look. That address line ends in a ZIP code, 46206, and ZIP codes didn't exist before July of 1963 — so this can't be older than that. It's also still signed “Stokely-Van Camp, Inc.,” the name the company used up until Quaker Oats bought it in 1983. Put those two together and it falls between 1963 and 1983, and everything about the art says the 1960s to me.

🔎 The edge codes

Run your eye down the right margin and you'll find the can-industry shorthand: 300 X 407 is the can this label was cut to fit — three inches across by four and seven-sixteenths tall, the standard #300 can used for beans and other vegetables, right around 14 to 15 ounces. Below it is 12 IPC&L 686970, and IPC&L is the printer: the International Playing Card & Label Company of Rogersville, Tennessee. George L. Berry, who led the printing pressmen's union for forty years, bought an old knitting mill there in 1927 and turned it into a print shop to give work to the pressmen coming out of the union's own trade school. Playing cards didn't carry it for long — by 1930 the plant had gone over to labels, and it printed them for Campbell's Soup, Gerber, Chef Boyardee, Life Savers and V-8. Down at the bottom edge is one more code, VL 32.