Antique 1930s-40s Splendid Lemons Crate Label 🍋 Klink Citrus Association, Ivanhoe, Tulare County California

Remember Splendid Lemons? 🍋 A Crate Label From the Town That Used to Be Klink

Size: 12" x 9"

🍋 A Lemon Grove, a Snowy Peak, and a Little Spanish House

If you ever wanted to bottle up the California dream and paste it on the end of a wooden box, this is pretty much how you'd do it. A fat cluster of lemons hangs down the left side with the blossoms still on, a road runs off between rows of trees toward a Spanish house with a red tile roof, and behind it all the mountains go purple with snow on the top. It was made to sell lemons to a wholesale buyer in Chicago or Pittsburgh in the middle of winter, and I'd bet it worked.

It's an original Splendid Brand crate label, new old stock, never pasted to a crate. Across the gold band at the bottom it reads "Shipped by Central California Citrus Exchange," "Produce of U.S.A." and "Packed by Klink Citrus Association, Ivanhoe, Tulare County, California," with the printer's line, Western Litho. Co. of Los Angeles, in tiny type underneath and the design number, 221, tucked in the corner.

🚂 Klink, Ivanhoe, and a Town That Changed Its Name

Here's the part I love. The packing house is called Klink, and the town is called Ivanhoe, and that's because they used to be the same name. The town in eastern Tulare County was first named Klink in 1888, and it stayed Klink until 1924, when it was renamed Ivanhoe to match the name of the brand-new Ivanhoe Elementary School. The story around town is that the railroad named the stop after one of its own men, an auditor named George Klink. The Tulare County Historical Society thought the old name was worth remembering, and in 1986 it put up a historical marker in Ivanhoe to the town that was once Klink.

The citrus growers never let the old name go. The Klink Citrus Association packed in Ivanhoe under a whole family of brands: Splendid, Exclusive, Perfection, Extractor, Ivanhoe Brand and Pride of Venice Cove all carry the Klink name, and the Boston Public Library keeps an Exclusive Brand lemon label of theirs that shows a slice of lemon pie. There's an earlier-looking Splendid design too, with oranges and gold scroll corners; this lemon grove is the one most people know.

Ivanhoe sits a few miles northeast of Visalia, on the east side of the Central Valley where the citrus groves run toward the Sierra. Klink was a Sunkist house: several of its other lemon labels carry the unwrapped Sunkist lemon in the corner. And it ran juice oranges as well as lemons, under an Extractor Brand label that shows a juicer filling a glass.

🎨 Western Litho of Los Angeles

The label was printed by the Western Lithograph Company of Los Angeles, a printer that made its living mostly on California citrus labels. It was founded in Los Angeles in 1899, spent a few years after 1906 as the Gilbert-Jones-Rugg Company, and then went back to being Western Litho. Brown & Bigelow bought it in 1953, and by about 1955 it was gone, right around the time the California citrus industry quit wooden crates and paper labels for good.

Litho houses like Western kept a library of scenes, and a good one got used more than once. This exact grove, road and Spanish house also turns up on the "Just As Good" brand of the Lemon Cove Association, another Tulare County packer just up the road, with a different name lettered across the top.

📅 How Old Is It?

The label tells you a good deal of it. "Ivanhoe" is printed right on it, so it was made after the town took that name in 1924. Western Litho's imprint in this form, "Litho in U.S.A. - Western Litho Co. Los Angeles" with a design number, was already in use by 1927, and Western was out of the business by the mid-1950s. Inside that window, collectors usually date this lemon grove to the 1930s, and the Center for Sacramento History, which keeps the same Splendid design (number 221 and all) in its James E. Henley crate label collection, catalogs it as 1940s. So it's a 1930s-40s label.

Copies are held by the Center for Sacramento History and by Azusa Pacific University's citrus crate label collection, so you're in good company hanging one on the wall.

🖼️ Living With It

• 🍋 Frame it for a kitchen: lemons, sunshine and a blue sky are about as cheerful as a wall gets.
• 🏡 Give it to anyone with roots in Ivanhoe, Visalia, Lindsay, Exeter or anywhere in Tulare County. It's the old town name, the packing house and the valley all on one sheet.
• 🚂 Pair it with other Central Valley citrus labels for a little history of the east side of the valley.
• 🎁 For a crate label collector, it's a Western Litho label with a named packer, a named shipper and a town with a story.

📐 Details

Era: 1930s-40s
Brand: Splendid Brand
Packer: Klink Citrus Association, Ivanhoe, Tulare County, California
Shipper: Central California Citrus Exchange
Lithographer: Western Litho. Co., Los Angeles
Design number: 221
Size: 12" x 9"
Condition: New Old Stock (unused, never pasted)
Material: Lithographed paper crate label