Antique 1930s Victoria Sunkist Crate Label 🍊 Riverside, CA, Historic Memorabilia!

Who Packed Victoria Brand Oranges in Riverside? 👑 VICTORIA Brand Oranges, Victoria Avenue Citrus Association, Riverside, California

Size: 11" x 10" ~ Little to no wear.

Queen Victoria herself, in a jeweled gold crown and a white lace veil, a gold necklace at her throat and a diamond at her ear, gazing off to the left with that famous steady look of hers. Beside her two big ripe oranges hang on a leafy branch, VICTORIA runs down the right side in tall cream letters, and down in the corner sits an orange wrapped in its Sunkist tissue. The Boston Public Library keeps this same label in its print collection and catalogs the portrait as the likeness of Queen Victoria. She's never looked better on a box of fruit.

🏷️ Every Word on the Label

• VICTORIA BRAND
• GROWN AND PACKED ON ARLINGTON HEIGHTS BY VICTORIA AVENUE CITRUS ASSOCIATION
• RIVERSIDE, RIVERSIDE CO. CAL.
• GROWN IN U.S.A.
• Sunkist, on the wrapper of the orange
• REG. U.S. PAT. OFF.
• SCHMIDT LITHO. CO. L.A., the printer's credit in tiny type at the foot

The back is blank, with the queen and the lettering showing through faintly in reverse.

🌴 The Queen's Avenue

The association is named for Victoria Avenue in Riverside, and the avenue itself was named in honor of Britain's Queen Victoria, so putting her on the label was only natural. It was the dream of Matthew Gage, a jeweler from Kingston, Canada, who came to Riverside in 1881 and built the Gage Canal, bringing water to the dry land that came to be known as Arlington Heights. To help sell land there, Gage and his brother-in-law William Irving laid out a grand divided avenue and a bridge, both named for the queen. The Riverside Trust Company started the Victoria Bridge over the arroyo in September 1891 and finished it in two months for $12,000, and in the spring of 1892 the grading of Victoria Avenue began and the first trees went in, with Franz Hosp, one of California's early landscape designers, in charge of the plantings.

In May 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt toured the avenue and dedicated a palm tree at its head. The city named Victoria Avenue Cultural Heritage Landmark No. 8 in 1969, and in October 2000 it went on the National Register of Historic Places. It's still one of the prettiest drives in Southern California.

🍊 Grown and Packed on Arlington Heights

The Victoria Avenue Citrus Association was already in business by 1907, when the Riverside city directory lists it with Reginald Brinsmead as secretary and John G. Bayley as manager, and its packing house out at Casa Blanca station on the Santa Fe. At the National Orange Show of 1915 the association's fruit came home with prize banners. It packed under several brands, Lincoln and Avenue among them, and the Avenue label was designed by C. A. Beck in the 1920s and printed by the same Schmidt firm. Its Washington navels were still rolling east by the carload decades later. In February 1947 the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Fruit Growers Exchange ran refrigeration tests on navel orange shipments, and two of the test cars were loaded at Victoria Avenue Citrus, on February 7 and February 17, and rolled out of San Bernardino bound east through Belen and Waynoka.

🌳 Where the Navel Orange Began

Riverside is where the California navel orange got its start. In 1873 Eliza Tibbets planted two little navel orange trees in her Riverside garden, sent to her by mail by William Saunders of the Department of Agriculture, who had brought the original budded trees from Bahia, Brazil in 1871. The fruit was so much better than the old seedling oranges that most new groves were quickly switched over to Washington navels, and by 1900 it was the most widely grown citrus in California. One of her parent trees is still alive in Riverside today.

Just up the road, Redlands was, for almost three-quarters of a century, at the heart of the largest navel orange producing region in the world, drawing people from all over from the late 1800s to the late 1950s. Today only one packing house remains to serve the approximately 2,500 acres of citrus still in production there.

☀️ The Sunkist Wrapper

That little wrapped orange in the corner is a story all by itself. The growers' co-op began in 1893 as the Southern California Fruit Exchange, and by 1905, with 5,000 members, it had become the California Fruit Growers Exchange. In 1907 its advertising agency, Lord & Thomas, came up with "Sunkist" as a name they could trademark in place of "sun-kissed," and in 1909 the Exchange launched its Sunkist campaign in the Midwest. When they found merchants passing off other oranges as Sunkist, they started offering a free Sunkist spoon to anyone who mailed in twelve Sunkist wrappers, just like the one printed on this label. The co-op finally took the name Sunkist Growers, Inc. in 1952.

🖨️ Schmidt Litho. Co.

The printer was Max Schmidt's firm, founded in San Francisco in the 1870s. It became the Schmidt Label & Lithographic Company in 1883, joined other printers in the Mutual Label & Lithographic Company in 1899, and reopened as the Schmidt Lithograph Company after the 1906 earthquake, a name it kept for about sixty years with plants up and down the West Coast, including this one in Los Angeles. In 1966 it merged into Stecher-Traung-Schmidt, which ran until 1994. The Boston Public Library dates its copy of this label to the 1930s, and that's where I date mine.

🖼️ 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!