Antique 1920s Lochinvar Brand Sunkist Crate Label 🍊 — Gold Buckle Association, East Highlands, San Bernardino Co., California

Who Packed Lochinvar Brand Oranges? 🐎 Lochinvar Brand Sunkist Oranges, Gold Buckle Association, East Highlands, California

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

A gallant knight in a plumed helmet galloping off on a black horse with a fair maiden in white riding behind him, her scarf streaming in the wind, on a blazing orange ground framed in real gold. This is an antique 1920s Lochinvar Brand crate label for Sunkist oranges, grown and packed by the Gold Buckle Association of East Highlands, San Bernardino County, California, printed by the Schmidt Litho Co. of Los Angeles, and never pasted on a box.

🔍 What's on it

LOCHINVAR in big yellow letters and BRAND across the top of an orange field inside a wide gold metallic border. The knight and his lady ride across the middle, the horse in a jeweled red bridle, and at the lower left a tissue-wrapped orange with Sunkist on the wrapper. At the bottom, GROWN AND PACKED BY GOLD BUCKLE ASSOCIATION, EAST HIGHLANDS, SAN BERNARDINO CO., CAL. and GROWN IN THE U. S. A., with PRINTED IN U. S. A. and REG. U. S. PAT. OFF. in small type at the lower left, and the printer below the gold border, SCHMIDT LITHO CO L A. The back is plain, with the design showing faintly through.

📜 Young Lochinvar

If you ever had to learn a poem by heart in school, it might have been this one. "Young Lochinvar" comes from Sir Walter Scott's 1808 poem "Marmion." The dashing knight Lochinvar rides in to the bridal feast of his beloved Ellen, who is about to be married off to another man, asks her for one last dance, and then swings her up onto his horse and gallops away with her before anyone can stop them. Those verses caught the public's imagination and were recited for generations, and I'd say that's exactly the moment on this label: the knight, the lady in white, and the horse at a full gallop.

🍊 The Gold Buckle of the Citrus Belt

East Highlands, out by Redlands in San Bernardino County, was proud orange country. The Gold Buckle Association even put its own boast on one of its other labels: "East Highlands is the gold buckle of the Citrus Belt." There's a photograph of the Gold Buckle packing house in East Highlands from 1910, and newspapers were writing about the association by 1917, when its work was held up as a sign of East Highlands' growing importance. In 1922 the Upland News reported on the manager of the East Highlands branch of the Gold Buckle Association, and in 1937 it was listed among California's agricultural cooperatives. The association packed under a whole stable of brands, Lochinvar, Gold Buckle, Silver Buckle, Unicorn and Polo among them, and it was still listed on Elder Road in East Highlands in a 1970 California agriculture directory.

🏇 Lochinvar Goes Back to 1897

The brand on this label is older than you'd guess. In June 1897 a group of East Highlands growers incorporated the East Highlands Fruit Association, with A. M. Alpine, James S. Edwards, J. M. Hamilton, J. Hartzell and S. H. Barrett as directors, and that August the Pacific Rural Press reported that their first two brands would be "Gold Buckle" and "Lochinvar," with the lithograph labels already being prepared. By 1909 the outfit had taken the name of its top brand and become the Gold Buckle Association: about twenty members owning 800 of the district's 1,200 acres, one share per acre, and the first pre-cooling and ice plant built by any California fruit co-op.

Its president, J. S. Edwards, was a scrapper. He led the fight over shippers icing their own refrigerator cars, a freight-rate case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1914, and he was a vice-president of the California Fruit Growers Exchange, the Sunkist people, until 1927, when he took Gold Buckle out of the Exchange in a row over auction sales. Gold Buckle went its own way for fifteen years, taking over the Greenspot packing house in 1931 and Highland Orange in 1937, then came back into Sunkist in 1942 as the Gold Buckle Fruit Exchange, and it was still a Sunkist district exchange in the 1970s. The LOCHINVAR name and the picture of the man and woman on the horse were registered as trademarks on December 11, 1923, the certificate claiming use since January 1, 1902.

Hard times came too. The January 1949 freeze wiped out about 80 percent of the Redlands district's citrus crop, and that summer Gold Buckle's Valencia shipments stopped by the end of August, weeks earlier than the years before and after. The story goes that the association finally shut its doors in 1978. By 1983 the Lochinvar trademarks belonged to Arnold and Margaret Wright of Wright Ranch in East Highlands, and they lapsed in 2004.

🗓️ How Old Is It?

That REG. U. S. PAT. OFF. means it was printed after December 1923, and the Sunkist on the wrapper narrows it more, because only Exchange members could use it: Gold Buckle was in until late 1927 and back from 1942. So this label comes either from the mid-1920s or from 1942 on, before Schmidt's 1966 merger. The 1920s is where the label trade and the Bowers Museum place it, and that window fits, though a Gold Buckle label carrying these same bottom lines was filed with the Patent Office in 1963, so the later window is possible too.

🖨️ Schmidt Lithograph

Schmidt was one of the big West Coast label printers. It started in San Francisco in the 1870s, came back after the 1906 earthquake as the Schmidt Lithograph Company, and ran under that name until 1966, with this label coming from its Los Angeles plant.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That knight and his lady look great framed in a den, a library or a dining room, and it's a perfect gift for a romantic, a poetry lover, anybody with Scottish roots, or anybody from Redlands, Highland and San Bernardino County.

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.