Vintage 1940s Quail Brand Crate Label 🍐 Contra Costa Bartlett Pears, Blue Anchor California Fruit Exchange, Valley Quail Bird Art

Who Sold Contra Costa Bartletts? 🍐 Vintage 1940s Quail Brand Pear Crate Label, Blue Anchor California Fruit Exchange

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

This is a Quail Brand crate label for Contra Costa Bartlett pears, sold under the Blue Anchor mark of the California Fruit Exchange out of Sacramento. It's a handsome one -- a California valley quail in full profile, topknot curling forward, every scale on his breast and flank picked out in fine detail, standing watch in tall seeding grass under a violet dusk sky. These are unused stock, never pasted to a box, so the ink is still bright and the sheets lie flat.

📜 Every Word On The Sheet

Transcribed exactly as printed: QUAIL / BRAND / CONTRA COSTA / BARTLETTS / NET WEIGHT / 46 LBS. / BLUE ANCHOR / CALIFORNIA FRUIT EXCHANGE / SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA / UNITED STATES OF AMERICA / REGISTERED U. S. PAT. OFF. 1919. There's a small lithographer's line set into the sand at the bottom too.

🐦 The Bird Is The Brand, The Pears Are The Cargo

CONTRA COSTA BARTLETTS sits in the second-largest type on the whole sheet, right under the brand name, so don't let the quail fool you -- this is a pear label first and a bird portrait second. NET WEIGHT 46 LBS. up in the corner marks a 46-pound pear box. The quail himself gets the real craftsmanship: that curling topknot plume, the scaled feathers running down his flank, planted in grass gone to seed.

⚓ Blue Anchor & The California Fruit Exchange

Two roundels share this sheet, and they both belong to the same outfit. The yellow one at lower left is the Blue Anchor mark itself, an anchor lettered CALIFORNIA FRUIT EXCHANGE in blue and red. The orange-ringed one right of center paints an actual orchard valley with mountains behind it and names the Exchange's home city, Sacramento. That's a different California fruit cooperative than the citrus one - no relation to Sunkist and the California Fruit Growers Exchange. This Exchange handled the deciduous fruit: pears, grapes, plums, stone fruit.

The Exchange itself was incorporated in 1901 by member associations out of Loomis, Newcastle and Penryn. It started out as the California Fresh Fruit Exchange and dropped the "Fresh" in 1903, which is how it came by the name printed twice on this sheet, once on the anchor and once around the orchard roundel. Local history holds that it was founding member George Cutter who suggested the anchor as early as 1903, and that it first went onto the labels in 1904. And Cutter didn't stop at the anchor: he served as the Exchange's president for sixteen years. The Exchange applied to register the words "Blue Anchor" in November 1917, claiming use back to 1901, with pears right there on the list of goods, and the mark was registered on December 3, 1918, as No. 123,687.

🏛️ The Blue Anchor Building

By 1931 the Exchange was big enough to put up its own headquarters at 1400 10th Street in Sacramento, dedicated to Cutter, with an anchor mosaic worked into the entrance floor and lettered CALIFORNIA / FRUIT / EXCHANGE -- the same anchor as on this label. The Exchange worked out of that building from 1932 to 1966. It kept the California Fruit Exchange name until 1969, when it became Blue Anchor, Inc. outright, and it ran for close to a hundred years before finally closing, at its peak with nearly 500 member growers and nearly $60 million in revenue.

🍐 Contra Costa Was Serious Pear Country

Up in Moraga, the Irvine family had Bartletts in the ground by around 1913, and by the early 1920s those pears were riding the rails east or heading straight into the Oakland canneries. Down in the Alhambra Valley around Martinez, growers were shipping something like 150 carloads of pears a year by 1920. And out in Walnut Creek, Hubert Howe Bancroft's own farm -- yes, the historian and publisher the Bancroft Library is named for -- took the state's top prize for pears eight years out of nine through the 1930s, ran 200 seasonal workers at harvest, and shipped fruit as far as England before the ranch was rezoned in the late 1960s.

🔍 That "1919" At The Bottom Of The Sheet

REGISTERED U. S. PAT. OFF. 1919 is a Patent Office line, and it isn't the Blue Anchor mark, which was registered in 1918. The Patent Office's 1919 register does carry a "Quail" label for fresh pears, No. 21,238, filed by Cook & McKenzie of Monticello, a general store and orchard partnership up in Napa County's Berryessa Valley. Monticello is gone now: the town was razed and flooded under Lake Berryessa when the Monticello Dam went in in 1957. The Sacramento Public Library's Sacramento Room holds a Quail Brand California Fine Fruits label dated about 1929, and counts the quail as one of many brands shipped under the Blue Anchor mark.

Copies of this label carry the printer's line STECHER-TRAUNG, S. F., CALIF. That San Francisco lithography house only went by that name from the mid-1930s until a 1966 merger, which is the best clue going for when this printing came off the press.