Exeter, California 🍇 The Grape-Packing Town Behind a Drawer Full of Crate Labels

🍇 Some towns leave behind a museum. Exeter, California left behind a stack of paper. Every grape and fruit crate that rolled out of its packing sheds wore a label on its end, and each one told a buyer three thousand miles away exactly whose fruit was inside.

I have eleven of those labels from Exeter packing houses on the shelves right now, from seven different outfits. Put them side by side and you can practically walk down the Southern Pacific tracks past every shed in town. So let's take that walk.

🚂 Where is Exeter, California, and how did it get its name?

Exeter sits in Tulare County, on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, close under the Sierra Nevada foothills. It's on State Highway 65, about 15 miles east of Highway 99, at roughly 390 feet of elevation. About 10,300 people called it home at the 2020 census.

The town is a railroad baby. A rail line was running through the area by 1888. A Southern Pacific representative named D.W. Parkhurst bought the land from an early settler, John Firebaugh, and named the new town after his own hometown, Exeter, England. Exeter incorporated as a city on March 2, 1911.

Before the town, the Yokuts people lived near an oak forest a couple of miles north, with Rocky Hill as high ground when the plain flooded. Cattle ranching grew in the early 1900s, led by the Gill Cattle Company. The damming of the Kaweah in the 1930s gave farmers a reliable water supply.

Today the city's motto is "Citrus Capital of the World," and oranges are a big part of its story. But open up the label drawer and you'll find that a whole lot of Exeter's fame was printed in purple. Grapes.

🍇 What were Emperor grapes, and why did Exeter pack so many?

The Emperor was a late red table grape, and it was made for the long haul. H.P. Olmo of the California Agricultural Experiment Station wrote in the 1940s that the "late-shipping Emperor" matured and colored well "only in the hotter regions of the San Joaquin Valley." That's Exeter's backyard.

Olmo called it "a variety par excellence for storage and shipment," with a tough skin and berries that hung on tight to the stem. Its popularity, he wrote, rested on the eastern demand for fresh grapes during the Christmas holidays.

Tulare County growers also helped change how table grapes are grown. A UC Cooperative Extension paper on trellis systems credits W.E. Gilfillan, the UC Farm Advisor for Tulare County, and Dwight Long, a Tulare County grower, with finding that more sunlight improved the color of Emperor grapes. The standard "T" trellis was adopted in 1930.

The grapes even crossed oceans. In September 1946 the Tulare Advance-Register reported that "the first Emperor grapes to be exported were packed in Exeter this week" by the Mayflower Fruit Association and the Way Brothers Packing Company. The same story counted 28 packing houses in the Exeter area getting ready for their Emperor run.

Four of my Exeter labels name the variety right on the sheet:

• Valley Queen Brand California Emperor Grapes, from C.D. Pruner & Son
• Million Dollar Brand Emperors, from Paul Dobson
• East West Emperors, also from Paul Dobson
• Golden Trout Brand Emperors, from W.F. Cosart Packing Co.

🎉 The town celebrated the grape, too. Exeter's fall festival began in 1913, when the ladies of the Presbyterian Church put on a Chrysanthemum Fair with a carnival and a children's parade. By 1931 it had become the Emperor Grape Festival. Today it's the Exeter Fall Festival.

⛵ Who was the Mayflower Fruit Association?

This is my favorite Exeter story, because the paperwork is so complete. On September 5, 1924, the Visalia Morning Delta reported that three new packing houses had gone up in Exeter that year to handle grapes through the California Fruit Exchange. One of them belonged to the brand-new Mayflower Fruit Association.

"Twenty-one growers of grapes organized the association," the paper said. Their plant stood on the Southern Pacific right-of-way, just north of the Hunt Brothers cannery. C.A. Dorsey was president, and Ernest G. Dudley was secretary.

And here's the part I love. The paper laid out the brand plan before a single box shipped: "The number one pack will be called Mayflower, and carry on its label a picture of the ship; the second grade will be Puritan, bearing on its label the picture of a typical Puritan maiden." The names weren't random. They were a grading system with a theme.

The association filed for the MAYFLOWER and PURITAN trademarks in August 1924, claiming first use on July 21, 1924, both for fresh grapes. Then came a third name. PILGRIM went into use on September 1, 1926, and was registered on August 30, 1927. That registration lists a whole orchard of fruit: apples, peaches, plums, pomegranates, grapes, figs, oranges, lemons and grapefruit.

You can hold all three generations of that idea in your hands:

• The Mayflower Brand label, with the sailing ship the 1924 plan promised, printed by Schmidt Lithograph of Fresno
• A Pilgrim label with a stern, book-holding Pilgrim, whose slanted "Pilgrim" script is the same lettering as the 1927 registration drawing
• A second Pilgrim Brand California Fruits label, with the Blue Anchor seal and the California Fruit Exchange named as selling agents

🎩 A fun aside about that Pilgrim's buckled hat. According to a 2011 Christian Science Monitor piece citing former Plimoth Plantation historian James W. Baker, buckles weren't commonly worn until later in the 1600s. Nineteenth-century illustrators gave Pilgrims buckles as an emblem of quaintness, the same reason Santa Claus got them. So Exeter's Pilgrim is the storybook Pilgrim, and he wears it well.

👥 Who ran the Mayflower packing house?

The people behind these labels turn up all over the old Tulare County papers. Clarence A. Dorsey, a Kansas native, died at his Exeter home in December 1940 at 68. His obituary in the Visalia Times-Delta says he had been president of the Mayflower Fruit Association for 12 years, and 13 years president of the Lindsay Citrus Growers Association.

Ernest G. Dudley, the secretary who signed the 1927 Pilgrim registration, was described in a 1926 Visalia Morning Delta article as "formerly professor of forestry of the University of Syracuse." By 1944 he chaired the natural resources department of the Tulare County Farm Bureau. A forester running the paperwork at a grape house is my kind of small-town detail.

Josh Benadom managed the house for decades. His wife Elva's 1999 obituary says he "was employed as the manager of the Mayflower Fruit Association in Exeter from 1934 to 1962." (A 1935 wedding notice put it at about three years by then, so he may have started a little earlier.)

🔥 The house had its close calls. In December 1936, the Lindsay Gazette reported a fire that completely destroyed the Mefferd Brothers orange packing plant and threatened the Mayflower plant to the north. "Because of heroic work by firemen no damage was done."

The association kept innovating, too. In 1927 it bought a portable car precooling machine, with four motors and fans, set in the middle of a loaded refrigerator car during the plum pack to push cold air through the fruit. In 1953 it shipped USDA test loads of plums in experimental containers.

Mayflower lasted a remarkably long time. In September 1996 the Hanford Sentinel reported that "Mayflower Fruit Association, a 72-year old Exeter cooperative which handles grapes and deciduous tree fruits," was merging with the Tulare County Lemon Association to form Mayflower-TCLA. By then it was packing plums, grapes, kiwis, nectarines, peaches and persimmons.

✈️ What made the Exeter Fruit Association's labels so bold?

Exeter Fruit Association was a different outfit from Mayflower, and from the Exeter Citrus Association too. It shows up in a June 11, 1924 Los Angeles Times list of new incorporations, and a 1937 state list of agricultural cooperatives records it as an Exeter deciduous-fruit association.

Their labels had a thing for airplanes. The Lone Eagle label is the showstopper. "Lone Eagle" was one of Charles Lindbergh's nicknames, and the plane on the label carries the lettering N-X-211, the registration of the Spirit of St. Louis.

Lindbergh flew that plane solo and nonstop from Roosevelt Field on Long Island to Paris on May 20-21, 1927, about 3,600 miles in 33 and a half hours. When the association registered LONE EAGLE in 1968, it swore it had used the brand since October 13, 1927. That's less than five months after the flight. The timing speaks for itself.

Collectors noticed early. A December 1973 Christensen & Stone mail bid sale catalog listed an Exeter "LONE EAGLE" label with "Lindbergh's plane at right" among a run of colorful grape lug labels.

The Pursuit label has a single-prop plane with a goggled pilot. The association filed the PURSUIT mark in September 1941. Back then "pursuit" was the U.S. Army's own word for a fighter plane. Under the 1924 Air Service designation system, the "P" in a fighter's name stood for Pursuit until 1948, when it switched to F for Fighter. Our printing carries Exeter's ZIP code, 93221, so it was printed after ZIP codes arrived on July 1, 1963.

🐕 Not everything had wings. The Setter Brand label features a setter's head. The association claimed SETTER for fresh grapes from May 1, 1928, registered it in 1950 and renewed it in 1970. Our printing also carries the 93221 ZIP, so it's from 1963 or later.

🦁 Who was John C. Kazanjian of Red Lion Packing Co.?

The Red Lion Brand label names "John C. Kazanjian, Grower and Shipper, Red Lion Packing Co., Exeter, California." That's a man putting his own name on the crate.

He turns up in federal court records, too. In a 1952 Ninth Circuit opinion, Central Fruit & Vegetable Co. v. Crane, the court described "John C. Kazanjian" as "an individual doing business as Red Lion Packing Company at Exeter." He's also named, as "doing business as Red Lion Packing Co.," in Joseph Denunzio Fruit Co. v. Crane, heard in federal court in Southern California in 1948 and 1950. That's Red Lion trading under its own name in the fruit business by the late 1940s.

🎣 What about W.F. Cosart Packing Co.?

The Golden Trout Brand Emperors label reads "Packed and Shipped by W.F. Cosart Packing Co., Exeter, California," with a line across the top I love: "U.S. No. 1, Sawdust Pack, Net Weight 34 Lbs."

Cosart registered GOLDEN TROUT for fresh grapes in 1966, giving its address as 1145 E. Firebaugh Ave., Exeter, and claiming first use on August 1, 1925. Its EXETER brand claimed use all the way back to September 1911. The Center for Sacramento History holds a Golden Trout Emperors label in its James E. Henley crate label collection, cataloged to the 1950s.

The real California golden trout is the state fish, native to Golden Trout Creek and the South Fork of the Kern River high in the Sierra Nevada. It's a fitting fish for a box packed in the shadow of the Sierra.

🏡 Who were the family growers behind Exeter's labels?

Not every label came from a big association. Some came from a family and a vineyard.

Paul Dobson's name is on both the Million Dollar and East West labels. Another Dobson label I've seen reads "Grown and Packed by Elizabeth and Paul Dobson, Exeter, Calif." Exeter's own history tellers at CACH Exeter write that Paul and Elizabeth Dobson arrived in Tulare County in 1923, that Exeter's Dobson Field is named for Paul, and that a room at the L.J. Williams Theater in Visalia is named for Elizabeth, an actress and a leader in Tulare County community theater. The Exeter cemetery lists Paul A. Dobson, 1897 to 1978.

C.D. Pruner & Son packed Valley Queen. The Exeter cemetery records list a whole family of Pruners born in Lodi, Virginia, among them Charles Dunn Pruner, 1883 to 1970, whose initials match the label. That's a long way from Virginia, and a whole family made the trip to end up in Exeter.

⚓ What does the Blue Anchor on Exeter labels mean?

Several of these labels wear a round Blue Anchor seal reading California Fruit Exchange. The Exchange incorporated on May 1, 1901, as a marketing cooperative of independent fruit growers and shippers. George H. Cutter suggested the anchor symbol around 1903. It was first used in 1904 and registered as a trademark in 1923.

At its peak the Exchange had about 1,000 growers of tree fruits and table grapes. Exeter was a hub. In 1944 the Exchange's Tulare County district manager kept his headquarters in Exeter, and the Mayflower Fruit Association was on its member list. The California Fruit Exchange was renamed Blue Anchor, Inc. in 1969.

🖨️ Who printed Exeter's crate labels?

The packers ordered their labels from the big West Coast lithographers, and the imprints are still on the sheets. The Valley Queen and Million Dollar labels carry Stecher-Traung of San Francisco. The Mayflower label carries Schmidt Lithograph of Fresno. The Lone Eagle carries A. Carlisle & Co., San Francisco printers and lithographers dating back to 1852.

Schmidt merged with Stecher-Traung in 1966 to form Stecher-Traung-Schmidt, which ran until 1994. So a label with a plain Schmidt or plain Stecher-Traung imprint most likely came off the press before that merger.

🎨 Can you still see Exeter's packing-house history today?

You sure can, and it's painted on the walls. Exeter's downtown has 31 history murals. The first, "Orange Harvest," went up in 1996, showing citrus pickers in the 1930s.

Two of them speak right to this drawer of labels. "Exeter Fruit Labels," painted by Lola Collins in 1999 on Pine Street, features citrus and grape labels from Exeter's packing houses. "The Emperor Grape Festival," painted by John Ton in 1997 at Pine and D Streets, salutes the festival that grew out of that 1913 church fair. There's also "Packing Ladies," showing the Exeter Citrus packing house around 1950.

So the town itself decided these labels were worth remembering. I couldn't agree more.

❓ Quick answers about Exeter crate labels

What did Exeter, California pack? Grapes, especially the late-shipping Emperor, plus plums, peaches and other tree fruits, and plenty of citrus. The city's motto is "Citrus Capital of the World."

When did the Mayflower Fruit Association start? In 1924, organized by 21 grape growers, according to the Visalia Morning Delta. It merged with the Tulare County Lemon Association in 1996.

Is the Lone Eagle label about Charles Lindbergh? The brand is Lindbergh's nickname, and the plane on it carries N-X-211, the Spirit of St. Louis's registration. The association claimed the brand from October 13, 1927, five months after his flight.

How can you date a crate label with a ZIP code? Five-digit ZIP codes began on July 1, 1963. A label that prints "Exeter, California 93221" was printed in 1963 or later.

🍇 Every one of these labels is a little piece of a town that packed for the whole country. Once the limited supply of original, unused labels is gone, there's no making more of them. Nobody is printing 1920s grape-shed brands again. That's why I keep bringing them home to save them, and why I'm glad to send them off to someone who'll frame them and tell the story.