Antique 1930s Our Pick Brand Pears Crate Label 🍐 Loomis Fruit Growers Association, Loomis California, Rooster Rustic Farm Decor

Who Packed Our Pick Pears in Loomis? 🍐 "Our Pick" Pears, Loomis Fruit Growers Association, Loomis, California

Size: 10 1/4" x 7 1/2" ~ Little to no wear.

Historic advertising Americana with an image of an adorable rooster carefully choosing which piece of fruit he will eat. This makes excellent rustic farm decor. A big white rooster with a bright red comb leans over a green bowl heaped with peaches, a pear and dark blue grapes, inside a deep blue circle with red-brown hills behind him, and "Our Pick" runs across the top of the bright red label in huge cream letters, quotation marks and all, with Pears in a big sweeping script beside him.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• "Our Pick"
• HAND GRADED, HAND PACKED
• Pears
• LOOMIS FRUIT GROWERS ASSOCIATION, GROWERS, PACKERS & SHIPPERS, LOOMIS, CALIFORNIA.
• PRODUCT OF U.S.A.
• S.P.S. LITHO OAK, the printer's line in tiny type in the corner

The back is blank, with the big letters showing through in reverse. The Center for Sacramento History keeps an Our Pick label from the same printer, S.P.S. Litho, in its collection, a long strip version of the rooster design.

🐓 The Grade Just Below the Best

The Loomis Fruit Growers Association was incorporated on April 29, 1901, with 18 charter members, and it was the very first member association of the California Fruit Exchange. It packed under two labels. The High-Hand label went on the association's very best fruit, in use by 1923 and registered as a trademark in 1926, and "Our Pick" went on the grade just below it, still hand graded and hand packed, just like it says.

In 1923 the association set up a quality-control system to inspect the packing out on the ranches, and in 1926 it built its big Central Packing House, the High Hand fruit sheds, where as many as 100 workers packed during the harvest. Workers' names are still written on the posts and rafters of that building. The association later left the California Fruit Exchange, which opened its own Loomis Agency in town in 1928, and the Loomis Fruit Growers kept going until 2001, when it closed as the last operating fruit shed in Placer County.

🚂 Loomis

The town went through a few names before this one stuck. A Placer post office opened on the site in 1861, it became Smithville in 1862 and Pino in 1869, and in 1890 the Southern Pacific settled on Loomis, after James Loomis, the town's saloon keeper, railroad agent, express agent and postmaster all rolled into one. In the early 1900s Loomis was the second largest fruit-shipping station in Placer County, sending plums, peaches and pears out of the foothill orchards, and the High Hand and Blue Goose sheds still stand between Taylor Road and the tracks.

🖼️ Display

Crate Labels are a reminder of a bygone era but the amazing lithography process 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 these out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries then they will be very difficult to acquire.

Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum!