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Brier Rose Syrup Label 🌸 Green Mountain Packing Co., St. Albans, Vermont
A Vermont syrup label that printed its own recipe. Brier Rose was a blend of cane sugar and Vermont maple, packed in St. Albans, the city known unofficially as the maple capital of the world. Pink wild roses, a red chevron, a navy SYRUP badge. This 1930s to 1940s label is unused, with a blank back.
SPECIFICATIONS
- Brand: Brier Rose, with REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. printed around the word BRAND
- Product: Syrup, printed as made from cane sugar & Vermont maple syrup
- Packer printed: Green Mountain Packing Co. Inc. of St. Albans, VT.
- Contents printed: 12 FL. OZ. / NET WT. 1 LB. AVD.
- Era: 1930s-40s
- Size: 3 3/4 x 2 3/4 inches
- Material: paper label, rounded corners, blank back
- Colors: sky blue, red, navy, cream, pink, green and yellow
- Place: St. Albans, Franklin County, Vermont, USA
CONDITION
New old stock. Never applied to a container, bright colors, blank back. Front and back are both shown in the photos.
THE STORY
A blend that said so. Vermont outlawed the adulteration of maple syrup, maple sugar and honey in 1884, after stores and restaurants had been passing off mixtures of glucose, cane sugar and water as genuine Vermont maple. The state's sugarmakers formed the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers' Association in 1893 and gave their members' maple its own label, and the federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 banned misbranded food nationwide. Blends stayed legal as long as they were labeled truthfully. Log Cabin had been selling blended syrup out of St. Paul since 1888, and Vermont Maid started in Essex Junction in 1919. Blended-syrup labels of the 1930s and 1940s spelled out the mix in words or percentages, depending on what the buyer's state required, and Brier Rose did it in one plain line.
The name. Brier, or briar, is the old word for a thorny wild rose. Sweetbrier, a small pink wild rose, grows wild along roadsides and pastures across much of North America, and the roses on this label are drawn as wild ones: five open petals around yellow stamens. The Brothers Grimm titled their Sleeping Beauty tale "Little Briar Rose" in 1812.
The packer. Green Mountain Packing Co., Inc. also sold a pure maple product. An old advertisement for the firm reads "Green Mountain Pure Vermont Maple Syrup, Packed by Green Mountain Packing Co., Inc., St. Albans, Vt." The University of Vermont Libraries catalogue a Brier Rose Brand Syrup piece from the company in their digital collections. St. Albans had other maple businesses too: in 1935 Québec Maple Products Ltd. formed American Maple Products Corporation there.
St. Albans. Chartered in 1763, St. Albans grew into the Rail City. The Central Vermont Railway, founded by the Smith family, was its largest employer, more than 200 trains a day passed through at the peak, and the railway's 51-acre headquarters complex is still the largest group of railroad buildings in Vermont. On October 19, 1864, Confederate soldiers under Lieutenant Bennett H. Young came down from Canada and robbed three banks of about $88,000, the northernmost land action of the Civil War. Today the Vermont Maple Festival fills downtown St. Albans every April, as it has since 1967.
GOOD FOR
- Framing for a kitchen, breakfast nook or farmhouse wall
- Vermont, maple syrup and New England collections
- Food label, advertising and paper ephemera collectors
- A gift for someone who loves wild roses or the Sleeping Beauty story
