Antique 1930s Drum Major Brand Crate Label 🥁 — Umatilla Citrus Growers Ass'n, Umatilla, Florida

Who Packed Drum Major Citrus? 🥁 Drum Major Brand, Umatilla Citrus Growers Ass'n.

Size: 9" x 3 3/4" ~ Little to no wear.

A high-stepping drum majorette leading the parade right across a citrus crate! This is an antique 1930s Drum Major Brand crate label from the Umatilla Citrus Growers Association of Umatilla, Florida, never pasted on a box, and it's cut in a long strip with all four corners clipped off, which I've always thought makes it look like a little banner.

🔍 What's on it

A majorette mid-strut with her baton raised stands beside DRUM MAJOR BRAND and PRODUCE OF U.S.A., with UMATILLA CITRUS GROWERS ASS'N., UMATILLA, FLORIDA along the bottom.

🎺 Here comes the majorette

A girl drum major was brand new and exciting when this label was drawn. In the late 1930s the majorette made her debut, when band directors decided to liven up the marching band by putting a baton twirler or two out front. It caught on so fast that high school girls all over the country wanted to do it, batons were made shorter and lighter for them, and through the '40s, '50s and '60s more and more girls became majorettes. A packing house putting one on its crates was right in step with the times.

🍊 Umatilla, the Land of Many Waters

Umatilla is up in the lake country of Lake County, in central Florida. The name came from Umatilla, Oregon, and in the Native American language of the Pacific Northwest the word is said to mean "water rippling over sand." Down here they like to say it means "Land of Many Waters," which fits a town with some 40 clear-water lakes within two miles of it. The town was incorporated on November 8, 1904.

The early settlers raised vegetables and cattle, then planted orange groves, and the Great Freezes of 1894 and 1895 wiped most of them out. They planted again, and citrus carried Umatilla through the twentieth century. A huge packing and citrus processing plant became the town's biggest business, until the hard freezes of 1977, 1981, 1983, 1985 and 1989 killed most of the groves in Lake County.

The Umatilla Citrus Growers Association was founded in 1909. It was a growers' cooperative, and the story around town is that the upstairs wooden floor of the first packinghouse doubled as a roller-skating rink back around 1912. By 1914 the association had bought a packing house at the corner of SR 19 and West Ocala Street. C.B. Hipson managed it from 1943 to 1972, and John Westervelt was its board president from 1965 until his death in 2020. It lasted more than a hundred years, until citrus greening and low fruit prices finally forced it to shut down. Its Duckhead label was its U.S. No. 1 packing label, and it still turns up on the signs at Umatilla's citrus history celebrations. And the Museum of Florida History keeps a Drum Major label in its citrus label collection.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That long banner shape looks great framed over a doorway or a kitchen window, and it's a perfect gift for a band kid, a former majorette, or anybody from Lake 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. Nobody is ever going to print these again. The supply for sale is all there is, and once it is framed on collectors' walls and tucked into gallery collections, these labels will be very hard to come by.