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Jackson Honest Clerk

Jackson Supply Co., Portland, Maine, c. 1905, 14". This is the only vending machine I know of that hails from Maine. Go Mainers! Way to avoid the shutout, and to accomplish it with such style---nice job, Mainers!

This model is made of ornately embossed cast iron and is heavy! It reminds me of the Caille Perfect Vendor and the Northwestern Sellem match machine with their Art Nouveau styles consistent with their early 1900s birthdates. It was a gorgeous era for vendor styles.

This model was available in dime and nickel versions. Inserting a coin and turning the handle clockwise moves a conveyer-belt-kinda-thingy that grabs a cigar and brings it toward the front where it drops down into the receiver. You can see a cigar in the receiver in the pictures above. Through the oval window you can see another one that's on the conveyor and will fall with the next dime.

The machine is loaded through the back, which is closed off by a piece of wood held in place by a metal bar that sets in place on the bottom and extends to the top where it's locked in place. I've been told that most Honest Clerks don't have their original metal bars and/or wood doors, but this is the only example I can recall seeing in person so I can't comment on that other than to pass it along.

Open the back and you'll see that the inside is pretty simple. The machine is loaded by removing one end of a cigar box and setting the box inside (like this), full of cigars, with the open end toward the machine's front so cigars could fall toward the vending wheel as they were dispensed. Once a box is in place, there's plenty of room to stack another on top so that's what I did. I did it for display purposes in order to get a box in front of the window, but it would have been rational for old-timey route guys to have also done that so the next box was already there waiting for them the next time they serviced the machine.

This model does not accommodate large boxes or long cigars. The King Edward Cigarillos box is among the smallest I could find and fits perfectly. The cigars showing in the pictures above are not cigarillos and are only 3 ¹/₂ inches long (but are much girthier than cigarillos, which many would consider a fair tradeoff). The King Edwards box is square or nearly square and is less than 5 inches wide and long. The dimensions of this box fit between the mechanism's sides going front to back (again, here), and it isn't so long that it blocks the back door from being locked into place. If you ever buy an Honest Clerk, I'm sure you'll figure this out but wanted to give you a head start in framing your thinking about the display. 'Course, if you're one of those guys who leave their machines empty then you don't have to worry about any of this display nonsense, but studies have shown that machines look 258.6% better with product than without product, so you should reconsider your approach to displaying your collection.

The example above is 100% original and in excellent condition. I bought it at the April 2023 Chicagoland show. I'd never been attracted to cigar vendors in general or this model in particular, but I saw it being put on a table and it looked soooo much better in person than it did pictured in Silent Salesmen Too. I loved it! I bought it intending it to be my one cigar vendor---as an example to the genre, you see, not as the start of a new branch of vendors for me. As I write this in February 2025, I now have three cigar vendors so perhaps I was fooling myself when I bought this one---time will tell. If I was, and if I end up with even more, then I won't consider it the worst thing to have happened to me.