Antique 1930s Schooner Brand Lemons Crate Label ⛵ — Goleta Lemon Association, Santa Barbara County CA

Why a Schooner on a Lemon Label? ⛵ Antique 1930s Crate Label, Goleta Lemon Association, Santa Barbara County

Size: 10 1/2" x 8 1/2"

A 1930s Schooner Brand lemon crate label from the Goleta Lemon Association of Goleta, Santa Barbara County, California, 10 1/2" x 8 1/2", little to no wear, never pasted on a crate. A two-masted schooner under full sail, and the best part is why it's there.

Lemons came to this coast with the Spanish missionaries in the late 1700s, and by the late 1800s they were a real industry. Sherman Patterson Stow planted the Goleta Valley's first irrigated lemon orchard in 1875. In 1896 the local growers banded together as the Santa Barbara County Lemon Growers' Exchange, and a year later the Johnston Fruit Company started up with Stow at the helm.

The Goleta association had its own comeback story, too. A fire wrecked its plant in 1950, and in 1951 it opened a 182,000-square-foot packing house, at the time the world's largest single-unit lemon-processing plant, able to handle some 2,000 rail carloads of lemons a year. Now that's making lemonade out of lemons.

⚓ What's Printed on It

• SCHOONER in outlined red-orange display capitals, with BRAND set small beneath the final R, over a two-masted schooner under full sail
• famous Santa Barbara County over LEMONS in the black panel
• GOLETA LEMON ASSOCIATION — GOLETA... CALIFORNIA
• CALIFORNIA / Red Ball — white script on a plaque over a solid red disc at the lower left, the citrus Exchange's companion mark to Sunkist
• GROWN IN U.S.A.
• SCHMIDT LITHO CO. L. A. — the printer's imprint, in dark microtype on the orange border at the bottom left

Goleta is the town, Santa Barbara County the growing district, and Schmidt Litho Co. of Los Angeles did the printing.

⛵ A Schooner for a Schooner Town

This brand name is a little inside joke. Goleta is Spanish for schooner, and the town got its name from ships in the Goleta Slough. In 1819 José de la Guerra's schooner ran aground trying to slip into the slough mouth, and Benjamin Foxen repaired it on the mud flats. In 1828 and 1829 William Dana hired Foxen to build a ship right there in the slough, the only safe harbor on the Central Coast with supplies at hand, using lumber shipped from Monterey. Launched as La Fama and renamed Santa Barbara, it's remembered as the first American ship built in California. Eighteen years later Daniel Hill bought it and renamed it La Goleta, then called his land grant La Goleta too, and Governor Pío Pico approved it in 1846. So a schooner on a Goleta label is the town's own name, in pictures.

🍋 The Goleta Lemon Association

The association was formed in 1935 by 60 growers with about 600 acres of lemon trees, and in 1936 it opened its packing and storage plant on La Patera Lane beside the Southern Pacific tracks. Its brands told the buyer the grade: Goleta and San Marcos were top quality, La Patera was extra choice, Schooner, Channel and Arboleda were choice, and Estero was standard. After the 1951 rebuild the association ran until 1978, when the packing plant closed. Santa Barbara County lemon acreage peaked at 9,328 acres in 1957; strawberries have taken most of that ground since, and Goleta throws a Lemon Festival every fall to remember the groves.

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.