Antique 1920s Sunrise Eatmor Cranberries Barrel Label ✨ NY, NJ, CHI

Who Packed Sunrise Eatmor Cranberries? 🌅 Sunrise Brand Eatmor Cranberries of New Jersey, American Cranberry Exchange, New York & Chicago

Size: 10" x 6 3/4" ~ Little to no wear.

A New Jersey dawn breaking gold and pink behind dark trees and a tall steeple, with a green meadow in the foreground, all in an oval window framed by SUNRISE BRAND running down both sides. This is an antique 1920s Eatmor Cranberries of New Jersey label for a quarter-barrel box, packed for the American Cranberry Exchange of New York and Chicago, and never pasted on a box. Those soft sunrise colors are just beautiful in person.

🔍 What's on it

Eatmor Cranberries in big purple letters across a cream ground, with of NEW JERSEY beneath, and SUNRISE BRAND in red running down tall panels on the left and right. In the center, the oval sunrise scene. At the bottom, ONE FOURTH U.S. STANDARD BARREL, PACKED FOR THE AMERICAN CRANBERRY EXCHANGE, NEW YORK, CHICAGO, and an empty PACKER'S NUMBER box where the grower's number was stamped in. No printer is named. The back is plain, with the design showing through in reverse.

🍒 Eatmor and the American Cranberry Exchange

Cranberry growers in Wisconsin, New Jersey and New England formed their own sales companies in 1906 and 1907, and in the spring of 1911 they pulled it all together as the American Cranberry Exchange, headquartered at 90 West Broadway in New York with a branch in Chicago. That's the name on this label. The Exchange pooled, graded and branded the growers' berries instead of letting every grower ship under their own name, and that's what the empty packer's number box was for: the fruit went out under the Exchange's brands, and the number told them which grower packed it.

The big brand was Eatmor, first used in 1916. The Exchange started advertising Eatmor Cranberries nationally in 1917, and by its own count the advertising paid off, with growers averaging $9.95 a barrel from 1917 to 1935, against $6.08 a barrel before. By the 1930s the Eatmor ads were running in the big ladies' magazines too; the Exchange's 1936 campaign ran in both Good Housekeeping and Better Homes & Gardens. New Jersey's cranberry business grew up in the Pine Barrens, with early growers like J. A. Fenwick and Joseph J. White near Pemberton and the Budd family, and it was White who showed that Pine Barrens soil was just right for cranberry bogs. The Exchange tied its brands to varieties and grades, and in New Jersey there was a whole family of them, American Beauty, Heather, Monmouth, Liberty Belle and more.

This label went on the quarter-barrel box, the smaller box that came into use in the mid-1920s, and the Boston Public Library dates its New Jersey quarter-barrel Eatmor labels to the 1920s. The New York and Chicago address dates it before 1951, when the Exchange moved its headquarters to New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1953 it became Eatmor Cranberries, Inc., and in 1957 it dissolved.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! It looks great framed in a kitchen or a dining room, especially around Thanksgiving, and it's a perfect gift for a cranberry grower, anybody from the New Jersey Pine Barrens, or anybody who loves their cranberry sauce.

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.