Antique 1920s Uncle Sam Brand Yakima Valley Apples Crate Label 🍎 — Wapato Fruit & Cold Storage Co., Wapato WA

Why Is Uncle Sam Selling Apples? 🍎 Antique 1920s Uncle Sam Brand Yakima Valley Crate Label, Wapato Fruit & Cold Storage

Size: 11" x 8 3/4" ~ little to no wear.

🗽 Uncle Sam Sells Apples

These come in three colorways, blue, red and green, and you can pick one or take all three. They share the same Uncle Sam portrait, all the same border of red fruit and star-and-stripe shields top and bottom, and all three packed under the UNCLE SAM BRAND name for Yakima Valley apples out of Wapato, Washington. The blue version is the dressed-up one: CONTENTS 40 LBS. NET, ONE BUSHEL, and the grade line EXTRA FANCY, with PACKED BY sitting above the packer's name. Red and green drop all of that and just carry CONTENTS ONE BUSHEL BY VOLUME instead.

🍎 The Man in the Hat

He's not wearing the top hat, he's holding it — down and out in front of him, looking at it more than at you, long white goatee, the collar of his black coat turned up. He sits inside a tall yellow arched frame that makes him look almost like he belongs on a stained-glass window instead of a produce crate. Then there's the border running along the top and bottom of every one of these labels: a continuous band of round red fruit on a leafy green vine, alternating with striped shields, each carrying a single white star. It's a good-looking, busy border, and the packer used the very same band on its Uncle Sam tomato label, so it's red fruit doing its patriotic duty next to the shields.

🪵 Made for the End of a Wooden Box

A label like this had one job: get glued onto the end of a wooden apple box, so a buyer walking the long rows of stacked crates at market could tell whose apples were inside at a glance. Northwest growers had settled on a standard apple box back in 1898, a softwood crate built to hold one bushel, which is why these print ONE BUSHEL right on the front. And it's a lithograph, like the crate labels of its day. The very first ones came off litho stones, and after about 1910 most were run on offset presses instead. Wooden crates wearing labels like this were how Washington apples went to market right up until the 1950s, when corrugated cardboard cartons with the brand printed straight onto the box took over and the labels stopped being made. I love that something this good-looking was only ever meant to ride on the end of a fruit box.

📦 Wapato Fruit & Cold Storage Co.

This is the company that put its name on the label, and it was a real, working outfit in Wapato, Washington through the 1920s and into the '30s. In May of 1920, trade papers reported the company building an addition onto its cold storage plant — two stories plus a basement, about 100 by 100 feet — with the ground floor used for packing during the season and the upper floor going to cold storage. Two years later, in the fall of 1922, Better Fruit reported a five-car order of extra fancy Winesaps that the company filled for a Boston broker, shipped all the way to London for the Christmas trade, with more apples that same season heading out to Norway and Scotland. That's a company that was shipping apples across an ocean, not just down the road.

They ended up in the Washington Supreme Court twice that decade. In 1923, Wapato Fruit & Cold Storage Co. v. Denham turned on seed potatoes the company had sold — the buyer planted them after being told they weren't fit for planting, and the court didn't let him recover for it. That case got cited for decades afterward in writing about seed warranties. Then in 1925, Sainsbury v. Wapato Fruit & Cold Storage Co. had the company on the other side, as the buyer of a mortgaged crop. By December of 1932 the company's capital had been cut down to $65,000, and in October of 1933 the plant itself was damaged by a fire that cost several thousand dollars. In January 1935 it signed notes for $10,000 and $521.47 that Yakima First National Bank was still holding when they turned up in a 1943 federal court record.

📚 In the Reference Books

This exact label has made it into print more than once. Gerald Czulewicz's "The Foremost Guide to Uncle Sam Collectibles" (Collector Books, 1995) shows it on Plates 207 through 210, both the bushel version and the 40-lb. Extra Fancy version. Hal Marcovitz's book "Uncle Sam" (2003) names the Wapato Fruit and Cold Storage Company directly as one of the outfits that put Uncle Sam to work selling its goods. I like owning a label that made it into the reference books. And Uncle Sam from Wapato made it into a university archive too: Washington State University's special collections library keeps three Uncle Sam labels from Wapato in its fruit crate label collection, all unused, and dates them to about 1925.

🍅 One Uncle Sam, More Than Apples

The same Uncle Sam portrait and the same border weren't just for apples. This packer also ran an Uncle Sam Brand label for Yakima Valley tomatoes — "distributed by Wapato Fruit & Cold Storage Co., Sales Office, Wapato, Wash." — and Uncle Sam labels for apricots and peaches out of the same operation turn up too. It was one brand image doing double and triple duty across whatever the valley was shipping that season.

✒️ A Borrowed Sam

Here's a fun one — a red version of this exact label exists overprinted "E. A. BAKER, Route 2, Wapato, Wash.," with the Wapato Fruit & Cold Storage Co. line blacked out underneath. Somewhere along the way, a grower out on Route 2 got hold of the packer's leftover Uncle Sam labels and put his own name on them instead. The overprint is proof this artwork outlived the company that first commissioned it.

🗽 Uncle Sam Himself

The story goes that during the War of 1812 a Troy, New York meat packer named Samuel Wilson shipped barrels of beef to the army stamped "U.S.," and the soldiers joked that the letters stood for "Uncle Sam" Wilson. The name is actually a little older than his contract, and the Wilson story didn't make it into print until 1842, but it stuck so well that Congress made his birthday, September 13, Uncle Sam Day in 1989. Thomas Nast was drawing Uncle Sam in cartoons by 1869, and James Montgomery Flagg's "I Want You" poster made him famous for good in 1917. So by the time this packer put him on a crate of Yakima apples, Uncle Sam had been selling America for a long time.

🌾 Wapato, Washington

Wapato sits in the Yakima Valley, inside the Yakama Reservation. The town was originally called Simcoe and got renamed Wapato in 1903, then incorporated in 1908 — the name itself comes from the Chinook Jargon word for an edible root that grew along the water there. It's apple and fruit country through and through, which is exactly why a company like this one existed in the first place.