Antique 1920s Appleton Brand Apples Crate Label 🍎 — Borgovich & Dragovich, Watsonville CA — Olsen Litho S.F., Art Nouveau

Who Packed Appleton Brand Apples? 🍎 Appleton Brand Apples, Borgovich & Dragovich of Watsonville

Size: 10 1/2" x 9 1/2" ~ Little to no wear.

A lady in a flowing gown smelling a rose, three giant apples, and a little orchard scene tucked in the middle. This is one of the prettiest early apple labels I've handled! It's an antique 1920s Appleton Brand apple crate label from Borgovich & Dragovich of Watsonville, California, printed by Olsen Litho. Co. of San Francisco, and never pasted on a box. And it has a secret, which I'll get to.

🔍 What's on it

Appleton in big flowing white script across the top with BRAND under it, and APPLES in the corner. On the left, an Art Nouveau woman with auburn hair and eyes closed, in a gray-violet gown, breathing in a red rose, with a garland of pink and crimson roses draped down her and a silver-gray ring behind her head. On the right, two golden apples and a big red one on leafy branches. In the middle, a framed view of an orchard in rows, a white farmhouse with a red roof, and purple hills behind, headed CONTENTS ONE BUSHEL. Across the bottom, GROWN PACKED AND SHIPPED BY BORGOVICH & DRAGOVICH, WATSONVILLE ~ CALIFORNIA, and down in the corner in tiny type, OLSEN LITHO. CO. S. F. The back is plain, with the printing showing faintly through.

⬛ The blacked-out lines

Look at the lower apple and the red box at the bottom left: there are solid black bars printed right over them, two on the apple and three in the box. The Boston Public Library has an Appleton label from the same plate, and on theirs those spots read IRREGULAR CONTAINER on the apple (two lines) and 3½ TIER, BELLFLOWER, NET WT. 38 LBS. in the red box (three lines). The bars line up with them exactly. They don't quite hide everything, either: in the little gap between the two bars on the apple, the tops of a row of red capital letters still peek out, right where CONTAINER sits on the library's copy. Their copy also has no "Contents One Bushel" in the orchard picture.

So this is the same label reworked. Instead of paying for a whole new label, somebody barred out the Irregular Container line and the Bellflower box lines, and added CONTENTS ONE BUSHEL so the label could go on a standard bushel box. Packers did this to save money, and you can see it happen right on the sheet. Farms had their labels printed by the tens of thousands and used them for a few years, and when something changed between harvests they took the pile to the printer and had the new information printed over the old. That's where odd blackouts like these come from. Turn it over and you can see it from the back, too: the rest of the picture only shows through faintly, but the five bars and the CONTENTS ONE BUSHEL line come through dark and crisp, all in the same heavy black. I love that kind of thing.

🌸 Watsonville, the apple town

Watsonville sits in the Pajaro Valley on Monterey Bay, and it was incorporated in 1869. The railroad was finished in 1871, making it an agricultural hub, and that same year Croatian immigrants began the move that would make them the masters of the valley's apple business. Many came from Konavle and Cavtat, just southeast of Dubrovnik on the Adriatic coast. Borgovich & Dragovich were one of the Watsonville outfits that grew, packed and shipped the valley's apples.

By the early 1900s fruit trees were replacing the grain fields, and by 1908 there were 14,000 acres of apples in the valley. In 1910 Watsonville held the first of four "Apple Annual" festivals to celebrate its largest and most valuable crop, and apples were still the valley's biggest crop in 1970.

📅 How old is it?

The Boston Public Library dates its Appleton label to about 1910–1929 and calls it a color lithograph. You can't bar out a line that was never printed, so this one-bushel version came after theirs, and the 1920s is right where it belongs.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! The roses and apples look beautiful framed in a kitchen or dining room, and it's a great gift for anybody from Watsonville or the Pajaro Valley, or with Croatian roots on the Central Coast.

Crate labels are a reminder of a bygone era, and the lithography on them is unparalleled even to this day, in my opinion. Museums and art institutes have galleries dedicated to them, and more and more collectors are seeking them out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.