First National Bank of Nevada Canvas Bag, Painted COKE, c. 1930–1965

The Piece

A drawstring deposit bag in heavy cotton duck, the olive khaki faded unevenly by years of handling. One face is printed in black capitals, FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF NEVADA, set between two heavy rules that were left open so a teller could write in the branch and the account. The printing is still strong and square on the weave.

The reverse carries a single word, COKE, painted by hand in red capitals running down the length of the bag. The letters are brushed freehand and no two are the same weight. The paint has thinned into the canvas and gone soft at the edges, which is what happens to a mark that was made to be used rather than to be looked at.

The top hem is double stitched and pierced by brass grommets finished in a dark oxblood enamel. A cotton cord runs through them and is finished at both ends with turned metal ferrules. Rust has bloomed around two of the grommets where the metal bled into the cloth.

History & Provenance

The bank was chartered in downtown Reno in 1903 as the Farmers and Merchants National Bank and took the name First National Bank of Nevada in 1929. It was insured by the FDIC from 1934 and had grown to twenty one offices across the state by 1960. In 1963 it opened a sixteen story headquarters at First and North Virginia Streets, a four and a half million dollar tower that was the tallest building in Reno when it was finished and that houses the city hall today. The name lasted until June 1 of 1981, when the bank became First Interstate Bank of Nevada.

That brackets the bag. The printed name cannot predate 1929 and cannot postdate 1981. Within that window the cotton duck, the enameled grommets and the corded closure all point to the earlier decades, before the trade moved to vinyl, zippers and locking hardware.

The painted word is a depositor mark. Businesses kept their own bags and marked them so a teller could route a deposit across the counter without opening it, and a brushed red word was the fastest way to do that. In Reno across this entire period Coca-Cola was bottled by the Shoshone Coca-Cola Bottling Company, which held the exclusive western Nevada franchise from 1929 and worked out of 960 South Virginia Street until the operation moved to Vassar Street in 1972. Nothing on the bag names a depositor, so that link is not documented. What is documented is that the bank and the bottler were doing business in the same town across the same years, and that someone carrying this bag wrote one word on it in red.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Graphic canvas like this does more work flat on a wall than it ever did full of coin. Stretched on a board or floated in a simple frame it reads as a piece of hard edged American lettering, black type on one side and a loose red hand on the other, and it costs a fraction of the printed advertising art it stands next to. Hung in a bar, an office or a mudroom it carries its own explanation.

Left as a bag it is still a bag. It holds tools on a bench, kindling by a stove, or nothing at all on a hook by a door. Objects that were built for daily use and survived it tend to look right anywhere, because nothing about them was styled in the first place.

For anyone with a connection to northern Nevada the appeal is more direct. This is a working artifact of two Reno businesses that were open at the same time on the same streets, and very few of them were kept.