Antique 1930s Festival Brand Lemon Crate Label 🍋 Johnston Fruit Co, Santa Barbara California, Red Ball, Schmidt Litho, Victorian Ladies

Who Packed Festival Brand Lemons? 🍋 Before It Was the Ranch Where Olivier Married Vivien Leigh, It Was Harleigh Johnston's Lemon Ranch

Size: 12 1/2" x 9"

San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito is famous for its guests: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier married there in 1940, and John and Jacqueline Kennedy spent their honeymoon there in 1953. Almost nobody remembers the lemon man who built it. In 1883 Harleigh Johnston bought the ranch, packed its fruit in a sandstone packing house, and made it the home of the Johnston Fruit Company of Santa Barbara, California. This is one of that company's labels: Festival Brand, a flower-smothered carriage rolling past the palms, and a pair of California lemons under the Red Ball grade mark. A 1930s label, unused and never glued to a crate.

What Is Printed on the Label

• FESTIVAL BRAND
• PACKED BY JOHNSTON FRUIT CO. / SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA
• CALIFORNIA Red Ball (oval grade badge)
• SCHMIDT LITHO. CO. L.A. (tiny printer's imprint in the lower-left margin)

Size: 12 1/2" x 9" ~  ·  Printed on: paper, color lithograph  ·  Condition: little to no wear, never applied to a crate

The Picture

Under FESTIVAL, an open carriage heaped with flowers rolls through a valley. Even its spoked wheels are wrapped in blossoms. Two ladies in wide, flower-trimmed hats ride in back, and up front a coachman in a top hat holds a tall whip over a matched pair of horses. Palms crowd the left edge, mountains fill the horizon, and in the foreground two big lemons hang among leaves and blossoms beside the CALIFORNIA Red Ball badge. An example of this same Festival design is cataloged in the Boston Public Library's crate label collection. And those mountains look right at home: the Santa Ynez range rises steep and rugged right behind Santa Barbara, and Johnston's own San Ysidro groves sat in its foothills in Montecito.

Harleigh Johnston and the Ranch That Became a Legend

Harleigh Johnston was already buying lemons from Goleta grower Sherman Stow by 1881, paying 90 cents for 70 pounds. In 1883 he and his partner Taylor Goodrich bought the San Ysidro property in the Montecito foothills from Colonel Bradbury Dinsmore. The land had been named by Franciscan friars for Saint Isidore, patron saint of farmers, and under Johnston it lived up to the name: the San Ysidro citrus ranch averaged 300,000 oranges and 100,000 lemons a year. In 1889 he built a large sandstone packing house to handle the fruit.

Then the ranch began taking guests. The story goes that in 1893 Johnston and Goodrich welcomed their first paying visitors — all eight of them — with tea under the moonlight. The partnership dissolved in 1895, and Johnston and his wife kept the guest ranch going, adding cottages over the years. In 1935 the Johnston family sold it for $50,000 to the actor Ronald Colman and his close friend Alvin Weingand, a hotel man who had come to Santa Barbara to help run the Samarkand Hotel and who later won a seat in the California State Senate in 1962. The old packing house became the Stonehouse restaurant. Hollywood did the rest.

Johnston Fruit Co. and California's First Lemon Grove

Santa Barbara County's lemon story starts a few miles up the coast. Around 1875 Sherman P. Stow planted about 3,000 lemon trees on his La Patera Rancho in Goleta — California's first known commercial lemon orchard, and the Goleta Valley's first irrigated crop. Stow's son Edgar later grafted Lisbon lemon onto grapefruit rootstock to protect the groves from fungus.

From 1889 to 1892 Johnston packed lemons right on the Stow ranch under a famous Mission Brand label. When competitors copied the Mission trademark, the growers went to court and won. In 1897 the Johnston Fruit Company was incorporated, with Sherman Stow as its first president, to process, ship and market the combined harvests of the local growers. The Ephemera Society of America notes that the Festival brand name was used from 1897 and became a registered trademark in 1924. For close to forty years Johnston handled Goleta's lemons, until sixty growers with 600 acres formed the Goleta Lemon Association in 1935 and opened their own packing plant on La Patera Lane in 1936. Johnston's other brands included King Tut and Pacific Brand, whose label carries a 1917 copyright and was printed like this one by Schmidt Litho. Co. of Los Angeles. The King Tut brand name tells you roughly when it came along. Tutankhamun's tomb was found in 1922, the news went around the world, and he's been King Tut ever since; Egypt was the rage in 1920s America, right down to a box of Santa Barbara lemons. The King Tut label shows a glass of lemonade and lemons. The Huntington Library's Lemon Men's Club Collection includes photographs from about 1950 of Santa Barbara lemons packed in Johnston Fruit Company wooden crates.

A Flower-Covered Carriage in Santa Barbara

A carriage buried in flowers was no fantasy in Santa Barbara. When President Benjamin Harrison toured the Pacific Coast in April 1891, the city greeted him with a flower-decked parade. C. F. Eaton of Montecito proposed turning it into a yearly "Battle of Flowers," borrowing the tradition from Nice, France, and the Santa Barbara Floral Festivities Association was born. In April 1892 the four-day Floral Festival filled State Street with carriages smothered in California poppies, roses, lilies, callas, marguerites and smilax. A float twenty feet long was pulled by four gray horses, and Señorita Carmelita Dibblee rode as the goddess Flora in a canopied boat of flowers.

What "California Red Ball" Meant

The oval badge is a grade mark, not a brand. The California Fruit Growers Exchange, formed in 1905, used two trademarks to rank the fruit its member houses packed. Sunkist marked the top grade: near-perfect fruit. Red Ball marked the middle grade: sound, juicy fruit with less than 2% decay. Exchange inspectors checked the packing houses, and a packer caught putting poor fruit under the mark could be fined or thrown out of the exchange. Label historians say Red Ball was the most abused of the marks for exactly that reason. Collectors say the Red Ball mark turns up on other Johnston Fruit Co. labels as well. The exchange became so identified with its top mark that in 1952 it renamed itself Sunkist Growers.

The Printer: Schmidt Litho. Co.

Max Schmidt was born in Germany in 1850, went to sea as a cabin boy, and landed in San Francisco in 1871. He built a printing business that survived fires in 1884 and 1886 and the total destruction of his plant in the 1906 earthquake, rebuilding by 1907. Schmidt Lithograph Company printed crate labels, canned salmon and vegetable labels, seed packets and stock certificates, with offices and factories along the West Coast and beyond, including the Los Angeles branch named on this label. Its 1921 clock tower still stands at Second and Bryant Streets in San Francisco. Max Schmidt died in 1936. In 1966 the firm merged with Stecher-Traung to form Stecher-Traung-Schmidt, which lasted until 1994.

How the Crate Label Disappeared

Labels like this one rode the ends of wooden lemon boxes across the country by rail. When the industry changed over to cardboard cartons printed directly at the factory, the paper crate label lost its job, and unused stock like this is what was left behind in packing house storerooms. Santa Barbara County's lemon acreage peaked in 1957 at 9,328 acres; the Goleta Lemon Association packed its last fruit in 1978. A Sunkist exchange manager put Santa Barbara County's share at about 15 percent of the country's summer lemons. The groves that Stow planted gave rise to an industry that shaped Goleta for a century, and the city still celebrates it with a lemon festival.

Questions People Ask

How old is this Festival Brand lemon label?
It is a 1930s Johnston Fruit Co. label.

Is it an original or a reproduction?
It is an original color lithograph with the printer's imprint, SCHMIDT LITHO. CO. L.A., in the margin, and it never went onto a fruit box.

What size is it?
12 1/2" x 9" ~

What does "California Red Ball" mean?
It was the California Fruit Growers Exchange's middle-grade trademark; Sunkist was the top grade.

Who was Johnston Fruit Co.?
A Santa Barbara lemon packer incorporated in 1897 and led at first by Goleta grower Sherman Stow. Harleigh Johnston's San Ysidro citrus ranch in Montecito was its home, and that ranch later became the San Ysidro Ranch resort.

Who is it for?
Crate label collectors, Santa Barbara, Montecito and Goleta history lovers, citrus and Sunkist collectors, and anyone who wants a bright piece of California on the kitchen wall.