Antique 1920s Avenue Brand Citrus Crate Label 🍊 — Victoria Avenue Citrus Ass'n, Riverside California

Who Packed Avenue Brand Citrus in Riverside? 🌴 AVENUE Brand, Victoria Avenue Citrus Ass'n, Riverside, California

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

This is one of the prettiest road pictures on any crate label I've handled. A long straight avenue runs off into the distance, lined on the left by tall fan palms still wearing their skirts of dry fronds and on the right by pale-trunked eucalyptus, with one little motorcar way down the road heading your way. AVENUE is set across the top with BRAND underneath, and the whole picture sits in a stepped gold frame.

The label reads GROWN AND PACKED BY VICTORIA AVENUE CITRUS ASS'N, RIVERSIDE, RIVERSIDE CO., CAL. There's no caption on the picture and there doesn't need to be. Palms on one side, eucalyptus on the other, packed by the association named for it: that's Victoria Avenue. The back is blank, with AVENUE showing through in reverse.

There's no orange on it anywhere, but Avenue Brand went on crates of oranges. The California Museum in Sacramento dates the label to the 1920s and credits the design to C. A. Beck, printed by the Schmidt Lithograph Company.

🛣️ The Road in the Picture

Victoria Avenue was the dream of Matthew Gage, a jeweler from Kingston, Canada, who came to Riverside in 1881 and built the Gage Canal to bring water to the dry mesa that became Arlington Heights. To sell that land, he and his brother-in-law William Irving laid out a grand divided avenue and named it, and its bridge, in honor of Britain's Queen Victoria. The first Victoria Avenue Bridge opened on Thanksgiving Day in 1891, and in the spring of 1892 the grading began and the first trees went in, with Franz Hosp drawing up the master plan.

The trees are the whole story of that road, and they're the whole story of this label. Pepper trees from Peru and eucalyptus from Australia were planted first, and palms and silk oaks were added soon after. The avenue was deeded to the City of Riverside in June 1902 on the condition that the trees be maintained and protected, and in May 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt toured it and dedicated a palm at its head. Riverside made it Cultural Heritage Landmark No. 8 in 1969, and it went on the National Register of Historic Places in October 2000. The palms and eucalyptus are still there.

🍊 The Growers Behind the Brand

The Victoria Avenue Citrus Association was already packing by 1907, when the Riverside city directory lists Reginald Brinsmead as secretary and John G. Bayley as manager, with the packing house out at Casa Blanca station. Its fruit took prize banners at the National Orange Show in 1915. It packed under a whole family of brands, Victoria with the queen's portrait, Lincoln, Casa Blanca and Avenue among them, several of them reading "Grown and packed on Arlington Heights." And it was still shipping navels east by the carload in February 1947, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Fruit Growers Exchange loaded two refrigeration test cars at its packing house.

Those navels have a Riverside story of their own. In 1873 Eliza Tibbets planted two little navel orange trees in her Riverside yard, sent to her by William Saunders of the Department of Agriculture, who had brought the original budded trees from Bahia, Brazil. The fruit was so much better than the old seedling oranges that growers switched over wholesale, and by 1900 the Washington navel was the most widely grown citrus in California. One of her parent trees is still alive in Riverside today.

🖼️ A Piece of California

Crate labels like this were a common sight once, and today they're treasured relics of a bygone era. They were printed by lithography, a stone or metal plate carrying the design, and the skill and careful attention to detail behind that craft is a big part of the appeal; nothing since has quite matched it. Demand has been climbing, and some museums and art institutes have set aside galleries for these labels, which says a lot about how seriously they're taken as art and as collectibles. If you collect, I think you'll want one on your shelf.

Picture this vintage advertising, a piece of history, hanging in your home. Out of the museum and onto your own wall, it brings a touch of nostalgia and real elegance to any room and lifts the whole feel of the space.