C.A. Raine & Co.

Tag: plug tobacco

  • Tobacco Tags

    When unscrupulous merchants placed cheap, lower-quality tobacco products in the empty wooden boxes of higher-end products to sell, tobacco manufacturers in the late 19th century faced a problem. Since all tobacco products essentially looked the same, how could they differentiate their plug and twist tobacco products from the competition? Manufacturers needed to find a solution to this frustrating problem.

    C.A. Raine & Co. tobacco tags.
    C.A. Raine & Co. tobacco tags. Image: Dale Dulaney

    By 1880 Americans began using products that were factory-made, cheaper and standardized. Examples are soups, soaps, canned goods, cereals, and safety razors. Advertising became an important means of luring consumers with something other than the lowest possible price. 

    Tobacco manufacturers dove head-first into this new practice of branding and gave their products unique names and symbols to create brand loyalty among consumers. After a brief flirtation with paper tags, tin tags became an important means of branding most plug tobacco products. In the beginning, these small pieces of tin of varying sizes – about the size of a quarter – were embossed with the name of the brand and cut into various shapes sometimes corresponding to the brand name. In the case of plug tobacco, the tin tag would have two small prongs that would be bent down and pushed into the plug to secure it. Later, as technology advanced, manufacturers used lithographed tags, with bright colors and custom images.

    Tobacco tags quickly became highly collectable whether the collector used tobacco or not. More than 12,000 plug brands were registered between 1870 and the 1920s, many with their own distinctive tin tags. By 1886 a collectors club counted among its members individuals from across the United States and published a newsletter allowing collectors to buy, sell and trade by mail. 

    In the plug tobacco industry of the 1890s, a widely-used and successful marketing tactic was the first nationwide premium system. Tobacco manufacturers redeemed their tags for gifts, many publishing catalogs offering prizes from candy to pocketknives to grandfather clocks.

    C.A. Raine & Co. was no exception to the rule and many tags used by the company survive and are highly collectible. Since it was one of the older tobacco manufacturers, examples of Raine tags can be found in both embossed and lithographed examples, often in the same brand. An example is “Garter Buckle” which must have had a fairly long production run or at least straddled the change from embossed to lithographed tags. 

    As far as I know, some Raine brand name tags only exist as embossed tags. These are “Our Heroes,” “Buck Eye,” and “XX Grade L.C.” To the best of my knowledge, other brands like “Raine,” “Lager,” “Close Shave,” and “Helen Wilson” only exist as lithographed tags. Other Raine brands like “Dickens Twist” do not appear to have any surviving tags, paper or tin.  

    Two Garter Buckle Tobacco Tin Tags, one embossed (left) and one lithographed (right).
    Lager tobacco tag from C.A. Raine & Co.
    Uncut plug tobacco with tin tags inserted as it would appear in the box. A section of plug with tag would be cut for the customer at the store with a tobacco cutter.
    Collection of various tobacco tin tags.

    Tin tags were a cost effective solution for manufacturers to distinguish their tobacco products from the competition. An expert on the American tobacco industry, Gerard H. Petrone, wrote that tobacco tags were “a relatively inexpensive but highly effective means of advertising. They fit into the thriftiest corporate budgets, no matter how large or small the firm.” 

    Sadly, tobacco tin tags began to disappear with the advent of wrappers made of materials like cellophane. The popularity of these tags has diminished but there are collectors who still appreciate their value and the window they provide into the 19th-century tobacco business.

    Sources:

    Kluger, Richard. Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. Vintage Books. 1996. Print

    Petrone, Gerard S. Tobacco Advertising: The Great Seduction. Schiffer. 1996. Print.

    Note: Thanks to Michael Wagoner of Winston-Salem, tobacciana collector and expert on tobacco tags, for sharing his knowledge.

  • Raine Family Treasures in The Valentine Museum

    Garter Buckle plug tobacco label.
    Caddy label for Garter Buckle brand plug tobacco, C.A. Raine & Co. A colleague suggested that this brand may have been aimed at female customers given the name and feminine imagery. Image: Courtesy The Valentine Museum.

    Remnants of the C.A. Raine & Co. tobacco manufacturing operation are difficult to find, as if the artifacts were scattered to the wind. As luck would have it, a group of caddy labels or crate labels survived and are now in the collection of the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia. 

    Caddy labels were affixed to or painted onto wooden crates that contained the manufacturer’s product. Extreme competition in the tobacco industry starting in the 1880s pushed manufacturers to create more varied and striking labels. In 1968 the American Tobacco Company, with offices in Richmond, donated a group of tobacco labels to The Valentine Museum, a private museum dedicated to preserving the city’s history. Among those labels are seven from C.A. Raine & Co., glorious examples of label art from two different periods in the tobacco industry.

    Close Shave plug tobacco caddy label.
    This circa 1870s label was created using a stencil. It would have been painted directly onto the wooden box containing Close Shave plug tobacco, one of C.A. Raine & Co.’s earliest brands. Image: Courtesy The Valentine Museum.

    The first is the only surviving C.A. Raine & Co. caddy label – known to me – from the 1870s. It is for Close Shave plug tobacco. The humorous Close Shave brand art featured a monkey shaving himself with a straight razor. The Close Shave label was not a label really but a stencil which was used to paint the brand art, brand name and company name on the wooden box. Paper labels would come later. 

    The tobacco industry after the Civil War was hyper-competitive and manufacturers were quick to latch on to any advancement in technology or technique. Developments in chromolithography, a multi-color printing process, not only changed advertising but quickly revolutionized the printed world of Victorian America from black and white to color, freeing commercial artists to create  images with unlimited shape and form. 

    Many of the leading lithography firms were started by German immigrants, where chromolithography was invented. C.A. Raine & Co. hired at least two of those firms based on the labels in the Valentine, A. Hoen & Co. and Isaac Friedenwald Co., both of Baltimore, Maryland.

    Our Heroes brand plug tobacco label. A second, working version is not shown but can be viewed in The Valentine Museum collection. Image: Courtesy The Valentine Museum.
    Game Cock plug tobacco label.

    The wonderful images in this post are shown with the generous permission of The Valentine Museum. If you would like to get a high-quality copy of your own – I have several framed on my wall – or to get a digital copy, go to this link to see the fee schedule and support this excellent institution. You can see these labels in the Valentine’s catalog at this link.

    As I wrote previously, the labels were donated to The Valentine Museum by the American Tobacco Company. I have wondered if that offered a clue to the fate of C.A. Raine & Co. after its bankruptcy in 1895. The company name lived on in some form after the bankruptcy and Charles Anderson Raine’s death in 1902. That is a subject for a future post. 

    Sources:

    Meggs, Phillip B., and Alston W. Purvis. Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 5th ed. Wiley, 2011.

    Petrone, Gerard S. Tobacco Advertising: The Great Seduction With Values. Schiffer Publishing. 1996.