Vintage 1950s Plen Tee Color Apples Crate Label 🍎 Yakima Valley, Wapato WA, Native Beauty!

Who Packed Plen Tee Color Apples? 🍎 Plen Tee Color Brand Yakima Valley Apples, Inland Fruit Co., Wapato, Washington

Size: 10 1/4" x 8 3/4" ~ Little to no wear.

Native Beauty! A smiling young woman with long dark braids and a beaded headband, a great big shiny red apple, and PLEN TEE COLOR in giant 3-D letters glowing from brown to gold on an orange-red ground. This is a vintage 1950s Plen Tee Color Brand crate label for Yakima Valley apples, shipped by the Inland Fruit Co. of Wapato, Washington, and never pasted on a box. These Native American images will never be used in American advertising again. Such a stunning and historic image!

🔍 What's on it

PLEN, TEE and COLOR stacked in big dimensional block letters that shade from brown to yellow with light blue sides, and BRAND in small type beside COLOR. Below, a large red apple with YAKIMA VALLEY in white and Apples in big light blue letters across it. In the lower left corner, CONTENTS ONE BUSHEL and PRODUCE OF U.S.A. On the right, the portrait: a smiling young woman with red lipstick, dark hair in two long braids, and a russet beaded headband with a zig-zag pattern and a single feather rising behind her head. Under her, SHIPPED BY INLAND FRUIT CO., WAPATO, WASHINGTON. No printer is named. The back is plain, with the design showing faintly through in reverse.

I get a kick out of the name. "Plen Tee Color" is plenty of color said the way a salesman would say it, and a good red color was something to brag about on an apple. That apple on the label sure has plenty of it!

🚂 Wapato, on the Yakama Reservation

Wapato sits in the heart of the Yakima Valley, within the boundaries of the Yakama Indian Reservation. The name comes from the Chinook Jargon word for an edible root, the wapato. The town started out in 1885 as a stop on the Northern Pacific Railroad, founded by postmaster Alexander McCredy under the name Simcoe, and it was incorporated as Wapato in 1908 with about 300 people. Once the Irwin Canal brought water in 1896, farming became the big business in town, and for generations the country around Wapato turned out some of the largest potato and apple crops by the ton per acre. Japanese families began arriving as early as 1905, many of them by way of Hawaii, and by 1916 to 1918 a Japanese Town had grown up along West 2nd Street.

🍏 Inland Fruit

The Inland Fruit story, as the company told it, starts in the early 1940s in Yakima, when Inland Fruit & Produce began as a small wholesaler of fresh fruit and produce. In 1970 it dropped the produce side to concentrate on Washington apples, pears and soft fruit, and later it did business as Inland-Joseph Fruit Company. The company's retirement plan was wound up in 2008, and in 2010 Valicoff Fruit bought the old Inland Fruit warehouse in Wapato, where by 2014 it was putting in a multimillion-dollar apple packing line, so the old Inland Fruit warehouse is packing Yakima Valley apples again.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! All that orange and red looks great framed in a kitchen or a dining room, and it's a perfect gift for anybody from Wapato, Yakima or the Yakima Valley, an apple grower, or a collector of Western Americana.

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.