Vintage Cray's Grape Soda Label 🍇 Holyoke, MA, American Icon 1940s - 1950s

Did They Call It Soda or Tonic in Holyoke? 🍇 Vintage 1940s-1950s Cray's Grape Soda Label, Holyoke, MA

Size: 4 1/2" x 4 1/8"

🍇 In Holyoke they didn't call it soda, they called it tonic, and for most of a century one of the names on the bottle was Cray's. This is an unused Cray's Grape Soda label for the big full-quart bottle, and the family behind it left their name on a street.

🏷️ What's on it

A square paper bottle label, New Old Stock and never pasted on a bottle, in bright green with a big cream oval in the middle. Cray's in red letters shadowed in black, then GRAPE / SODA / FULL QUART, and at the top a red-and-black interlocked CS monogram in a gold ring. In the four corners, little line drawings of four ways to spend a Saturday: a golfer mid-swing by the flag, a football player running with the ball, a sailboat with gulls overhead, and a hunter with his dog. Along the bottom, word for word: "Contains filtered carbonated water, true and artificial coloring, citric acid and certified color," and "CRAY SODA COMPANY, HOLYOKE, MASS." The back is plain.

No grapes on a grape soda label, which I love. They skipped the fruit and sold the life that went with it: the golf course, the ball game, the lake and the woods.

🏭 The Cray family

Patrick J. Cray started the business sometime before the 1920s. His first bottling plant sat on a dead-end road running east off Northampton Street, south of Dwight Street, and that road is called Cray Avenue today. The family homestead still stands right behind the old plant. Cray's made tonic in all sorts of flavors, plus seltzer water, and sold it to Holyoke's bars, restaurants and grocery stores, and out to the amusement parks, Mountain Park up at Mount Tom and Hampton Ponds, where working families spent their summer Sundays. Tonic is an old New England word for soda, in use since at least 1888. It's mostly a Boston-area word, heard across eastern Massachusetts and up into parts of Maine and New Hampshire, but out in Holyoke the Crays were selling tonic too.

After Patrick died, his eldest son Frank and Frank's wife Isabelle ran the company, along with Cray's Package Liquor Store, attached right to the bottling plant. Sometime after the 1950s Frank handed the soda business to his younger brother William, "Billy" Cray, who moved the plant to another spot off Northampton Street. Billy sold it to the Ziff family, who ran it for decades, and the Ziffs, as one of the family tells it, sold Cray's to Polar Beverages of Worcester.

📜 The Paper City

Holyoke sits in Hampden County in Western Massachusetts, about eight miles north of Springfield. It's one of the early planned industrial cities in America, laid out on a grid and built right along with the Holyoke Dam to use the water power of Hadley Falls on the Connecticut River. It grew from just under 5,000 people in 1860 to over 60,000 by 1920, as families from Ireland, French Canada and Poland came to work the mills, and in the late 1800s it made an estimated 80 percent of the writing paper used in the United States, which is how it earned the name "the Paper City." A city of mill hands, corner bars and church picnics is a thirsty city, and that's the market Cray's grew up in. The good times didn't last forever: between 1955 and 1970, one of every two industrial jobs in Holyoke disappeared. Cray's outlasted a lot of it.

📅 How old is it?

The label doesn't print a date. It's a 1940s to 1950s label, from the years Frank and Isabelle were running the company, before Billy took it over.

A note on condition: these have one slight, barely noticeable ripple at the top left. I am not sure how it could possibly have gotten there, but it seems a large supply was affected, as the few others out there have the same ripple. I doubt you would notice it on display, but please see the pictures and judge for yourself.

🏡 Display

It's a great one framed on its own, with a cream or green mat, or next to other New England tonic labels, and it's a perfect gift for anyone with Holyoke or Pioneer Valley roots who remembers a summer day at Mountain Park. We're an American family business, and the stories behind these pieces matter as much as the pieces themselves. Preserving them is part of what we do.