Robert Mullen
Catalog Number: 2011.014.062
The Exposition Universelle Internationale was a world’s fair hosted by the city of Paris in 1900. Exhibiting at the fair was La Crosse’s largest beer maker, the John Gund Brewery.
Gund entered his Peerless Beer in the brewing competition. The Peerless brand earned this gold medal for the brewery.
The medal is two and one-half inches in diameter and features an image of France wearing a liberty cap. The backside shows Nike, the goddess of victory, carrying an athlete on her shoulders. Below the goddess, it reads “J. Gund Brewing Company.” The medal is made of bronze but is gold-plated.
You would think that John Gund would have taken this medal home to La Crosse and immediately started an advertising campaign bragging about his accomplishment. But this was before the time of modern advertising agents, and there was barely a mention of the medal for several years.
While the exposition also gave out silver and bronze medals and diplomas of excellence, the gold medal was actually the second place to the grand prize award.
Nearly every exhibitor received some kind of prize just for showing up. There were 83,000 exhibitors at the fair, and the judges gave out more than 45,000 medals and awards.
More than 500 grand prize, gold, silver and bronze medals and diplomas were handed out for beers from Europe, Mexico, Japan and the U.S. So, maybe the gold medal didn’t seem all that notable at the time.
Four years later, the Gund Brewery received another gold medal for its Peerless brand at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.
Early in 1905, the La Crosse Tribune published an advertisement for Peerless beer announcing the St. Louis medal would be exhibited in the window of George B. Rose’s jewelry shop at 310 Main St. The Paris medal was not mentioned.
Finally, by 1906, Gund and his marketers saw the opportunity to use the medals to their advantage. The company advertised widely throughout the Midwest with ads that touted both the Paris and St. Louis medals.
Like today, the brewing industry was a very competitive field. Other breweries like Anheuser-Busch and Pabst also boasted about their medals from various expositions. It was smart marketing. Making use of such medals in advertising was not limited to beer; Campbell’s Soup, which also won a gold medal at Paris, has featured an image of this medal on its labels for more than a hundred years.
After about 10 years of promoting the prizes in its ads, Gund Brewery’s marketers shifted their emphasis to other themes like the health benefits of beer, its taste, and the long history of the company.
By the time Prohibition closed Gund’s doors for good in 1920, the company’s gold medals were only a memory.
This Paris medal was a gift to the La Crosse County Historical Society from Tye Schwalbe in 2011. The whereabouts of the St. Louis medal is unknown.
This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on August 8, 2020.
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