Antique 1920s Cal'Chief Bartlett Pears Crate Label 🍐 Suisun California

Size: 10 1/2" x 7" ~ Little to no wear. They vary a little one to the next.

🍐 A Suisun Pear Label With a Real Man Behind the Name

This is an unused CAL'CHIEF Brand California Bartlett pear crate label, printed for the R. D. Robbins Estate of Suisun, California, and it never made it onto the wooden pear box it was made for. The sheet is a chromolithograph on a deep midnight-indigo ground. On the left, a pale-blue disc ringed in yellow carries the brand in blue lettering — CAL'CHIEF / BRAND / CALIFORNIA / BARTLETTS — around an open center, with "46 lbs. Net" stamped above it, the standard weight for a western Bartlett pear box. On the right is a large profile portrait of a man in a full feathered war bonnet, yellow-and-red plumes, a red-and-white beaded browband, wrapped in red cloth with round gold-toned disc ornaments at the throat, painted in warm reds, yellows and browns against the dark ground. Lower left, in the same blue lettering, the label reads "R.D.ROBBINS ESTATE / SUISUN ~ CALIFORNIA."

🏦 The Man the Label Names

R. D. Robbins was Reuel Drinkwater Robbins, and the word "ESTATE" on this label is the whole reason his story belongs here: it only gets printed after a man dies, which means this sheet dates to 1919 or later. Robbins came to Suisun from Maine in 1860 with almost nothing, worked as a laborer in the valley, then clerked in a lumber yard, bought a half-interest within two years and eventually owned the whole business. On February 7, 1876, he chartered the Bank of Suisun with $100,000 in capital stock, and in 1883 he joined a group of Suisun and Vacaville businessmen founding the Bank of Vacaville alongside it. He later won a lawsuit against fellow orchardist A. T. Hatch for roughly $200,000. By the time he died in 1919 at about eighty, he was president of both banks, "prominently connected" to a dozen others, one of the largest fruit growers in California, and reputedly the wealthiest man in Solano County.

His estate kept packing pears under his name after he was gone — which is exactly what "R.D. Robbins Estate" on this label is telling you. The same estate also ran a sibling brand, Cal-Junior, pairing an Indian-boy-with-a-tomahawk portrait with this Cal'Chief adult figure under the identical Suisun shipper line — a father-and-son pair of brands from one packing house.

⚖️ From a Pear Crate to the U.S. Supreme Court

Robbins's estate had one more chapter worth telling. His executors fought the federal government over $6,788.03 in 1918 income tax, arguing that in a community-property state like California, a husband should only owe tax on half of the couple's income rather than all of it. The case, United States v. Robbins, reached the U.S. Supreme Court, was argued in December 1925, and decided January 4, 1926 — the Court ruled 7-1 against the estate, holding the husband liable for the whole amount. Arguing the case for the family was Robbins's own son, Lloyd McCullough Robbins, a San Francisco attorney who'd go on to advise the U.S. delegation to the post-WWI Reparations Commission. In 1952 he founded the Robbins Collection in religious and civil law at UC Berkeley's law school, named for his parents, Reuel and Saditha Robbins. A pear label most people would glance past and toss turns out to trace straight back to a family that helped found two Solano County banks and endowed a research collection that still bears their name at Berkeley today.

🌄 Suisun Valley, Pear Country

Suisun Valley, in Solano County, grew Bartlett pears (and some Bing cherries) as its main crop from the late 1880s into the early 1970s, before the vineyards that dominate the valley today took over the ground. Suisun City itself takes its name from the Suisun, a Patwin people of the bay; Solano County is named for their leader, known to history as Chief Solano, baptized Francisco Solano. A cluster of Suisun packing houses ran similar brands in these same years — Rancheria, Big City, Cal-Junior, and this one — and local museums in Suisun City have exhibited exactly this kind of fruit crate label as a piece of the valley's own packing-house history.

🎨 The Portrait

Native American imagery was a common design convention on California citrus and fruit crate labels through the 1910s and 1920s, used by packing houses across the state to signal a sense of place and heritage to wholesale buyers who'd never see the orchard. This label's portrait is a skilled piece of that tradition — real tonal modeling in the face and feathers, closer to a reduced easel painting than routine jobbing lithography. A small painter's monogram sits at the lower right of the portrait, on every copy of this label.