Antique 1920s-50s Rare Garden Bouquet Toilet Soap Label 🧼 Manhattan, NY For Sale

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Antique 1920s-50s Rare Garden Bouquet Toilet Soap Label 🧼 Manhattan, NY:
$9.95

Very Rare Antique Garden Bouquet Toilet Soap Wrapper From the Manhattan Soap Company, 1920s-50s

7\" x 4 3/4\" ~ Never been used.

Pretty and simple. A little garden gate with flowers in slate blue and red on cream, \"Garden Bouquet\" in script, and a promise I\'d take any day: \"a high grade French milled soap. Mild and neutral for the most sensitive skin. Lathers freely in all kinds of water.\" Up top it says USE GARDEN BOUQUET FOR FRESH & EXQUISITE CLEANLINESS. It\'s the whole flat wrapper, die-cut and never folded around a bar, with Garden Bouquet repeated on the end panels and the flap, and MANHATTAN SOAP CO., INC., NEW YORK at the foot. I haven\'t found another loose one for sale.

🧼 One of Their Two Famous Soaps

When the Hagley Library catalogued the Manhattan Soap Company, it summed the firm up as well known for two soaps: Sweetheart and Garden Bouquet. The company was Frank Gaius Burke\'s. He\'d raised sheep in North Dakota and cattle in Texas before he started making toilet soaps and talcum powder in New York in the 1880s; the records give three different founding years, 1885, 1888 and 1890. Its offices were on West 38th Street in Manhattan, it had an early plant on Stone Street, and in November 1916 it bought waterfront property at the Degnon Terminal in Long Island City, Queens. In 1925 it took over a World War I shipyard building in Bristol, Pennsylvania, the building Dial soap later came out of.

A good one from 1937: that April the company agreed to stop using the word \"doctor\" in its ads, since people might think a physician had a hand in the soap, and it promised the Federal Trade Commission it wouldn\'t print false prices on its products. In 1942 an export listing was still offering \"Sweetheart, Corona and Garden Bouquet toilet soaps,\" and in July 1956 Purex bought the company.

📅 How Old Is It?

The \", INC.\" on the wrapper is the clue. Burke\'s company signed itself plain \"Manhattan Soap Co.\" right up to a November 1922 filing, and \"Manhattan Soap Company, Inc.\" first appears in late 1923. With Purex taking over in 1956, that puts this wrapper somewhere from the 1920s to the 1950s.

📋 Details