Vintage 1940s Wenoka Crate Label 🍐 Wenatchee, WA, Native American Chief Decor!

Who Packed Wenoka Pears? 🍐 Wenoka Pears, Wenatchee-Okanogan Cooperative Federation

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

A big flint arrowhead with a Native American man's portrait inside it, on a deep blue-violet ground. It's one of the boldest designs I've seen on a pear label. This is a vintage 1940s Wenoka Pears crate label, packed by the Wenatchee-Okanogan Cooperative Federation of Wenatchee, Washington, printed by Ridgway Litho Co. of Seattle, and never pasted on a box.

🔍 What's on it

In the middle, a large gray-white arrowhead, point down, drawn with chipped, knapped facets and a hard black shadow. Inside it, a painted profile of a Native American man facing left, with long black hair in a braid and two white feathers tipped in red-orange. WENOKA across the top and PEARS across the bottom in rough-edged orange-yellow letters, with TRADE MARK, REG. U. S. PAT. OFF. and © 1927-W.O.C.F. On the left, a white rosette seal on a ribbon, lettered OREGON · WASHINGTON · CALIFORNIA PEAR BUREAU, around a pear and a mountain scene, with SUPER QUALITY PEARS in the center. On the right, PACKED BY WENATCHEE-OKANOGAN COOPERATIVE FEDERATION, WENATCHEE, WASHINGTON, U. S. A. Along the edges, LABEL LITHOGRAPHED IN U.S.A. and the printer, RIDGWAY LITHO CO. SEATTLE. The back is plain.

Put WENatchee and OKanogan together and you get Wenoka, and the © 1927 line shows the Federation had registered the design by then. A copyright line like that can ride along on reprints for years, so it dates the artwork, not necessarily this printing. Washington State University's special collections keep a Wenoka label of their own and date it to about 1940.

🌄 Wenatchee and the Okanogan

Wenatchee sits where the Wenatchee River meets the Columbia, and it takes its name from the Wenatchi people who lived there first. The first apple trees went in there in 1872, the Great Northern Railway came over Stevens Pass in 1893, and by 1902 Wenatchee was calling itself the "Apple Capital of the World." Up the Columbia to the north is the Okanogan country, more orchard land, and the Wenatchee-Okanogan Cooperative Federation, just as its name says, brought the growers' cooperatives of both together.

Pears grew there right alongside the apples. In 1931 the pear growers of Oregon and Washington formed the Oregon-Washington Pear Bureau to advertise their fruit, starting with a $15,000 budget and 2.1 million boxes of winter pears, and one of the first things they worked on was a pear wrap to keep the fruit from bruising on the way to market. It's still going today as Pear Bureau Northwest. The seal on this label carries California in the name too.

Labels like this one went on the ends of wooden fruit crates in Washington from the early 1900s on, and the Wenatchee Valley Museum says the whole art form died out after the cardboard box came in, in the late 1950s. Every one was a careful piece of lithography, not a quick print job.

The Wenoka brand goes back to 1922, and it took in growers from well up the Columbia. The Methow-Pateros growers were one of Wenoka's charter members, and their apples were sold jointly under their own MEPA label and the Wenoka brand. The printer, Ridgway Litho of Seattle, operated from 1921 into the 1970s.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That blue-violet and orange really pops framed, and it's a perfect gift for anybody from Wenatchee or the Okanogan, or anybody who collects Northwest fruit labels.

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.