Antique 1930s Gold Buckle Brand Sunkist Orange Crate Label 🍊 — East Highlands, San Bernardino County CA

Who Packed Gold Buckle Oranges? 🍊 GOLD BUCKLE Brand Sunkist Orange Crate Label, Gold Buckle Ass'n., East Highlands, San Bernardino County CA

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

Here's a label that brags, and I love it for that. Printed right on the belt is the growers' own boast, calling East Highlands the "Gold Buckle of the Citrus Belt," and the artist took them at their word: a belt with two big buckles cinched around the East Highlands groves, with the snowy San Bernardino Mountains standing behind them. It's an antique 1930s orange label from the growers of the Gold Buckle Ass'n. out in East Highlands, with a Sunkist-wrapped orange tucked in the corner and SCHMIDT LITHO. CO. L.A. in tiny print along the bottom edge.

Along that bottom edge it also says PRINTED IN U.S.A., GROWN IN THE U.S.A. and REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. The Boston Public Library holds this same design, every printed line matching, and its cataloger dates it to about the 1930s.

🏔️ East Highlands, at the Foot of the Mountains

Those mountains in the picture are the real thing. Highland and East Highland lie at the southern foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, about 65 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Henry Rabel was one of the first settlers, buying more than 100 acres in 1857 and putting up an 11-room hotel with bath houses at what got to be known as Rabel Springs. In 1858 the pioneers Lewis Cram and Frederick Van Leuven dug the Cram-Van Leuven ditch from the Santa Ana River to their land in East Highland, and by the early 1880s the settlers were planting orchards of seedling oranges and other fruit.

The railroad is what made it a citrus town. A steam line from downtown San Bernardino to Harlem Springs in Highland started running in 1888, packing houses went up at the depots, and Highland earned a name for some of the finest navel oranges in the world, sweet and seedless. Highland became an official townsite in 1891. By 1892 the Santa Fe's famous Kite Loop, 166 miles of track laid out in a double loop like a figure eight, was carrying sightseers out from Los Angeles through these groves under the slogan "No scene twice seen." Bits of the old depots and the Kite Loop can still be found in Highland and East Highland, and Highland finally incorporated as a city in 1987.

🔗 The Gold Buckle Association

The Gold Buckle packing house was already standing in East Highlands in 1910. The library at California State University, San Bernardino keeps a photograph of it from that year, and another of its packing crew. The association loved its belt joke and ran it across a whole family of labels, Silver Buckle and Belt among them, and it packed under plenty of other names too: Lochinvar, Greenspot, Sun, Arrowhead, Pine Cone, and Unicorn, which shows a dappled unicorn at full gallop. In October 1937 the San Bernardino Sun reported that Gold Buckle had taken in the Highland Orange association, with the main plant staying in East Highlands.

The Sunkist on the wrapped orange belongs to the growers' co-op that became the California Fruit Growers Exchange. It adopted Sunkist as its trademark in April 1908 and printed it on the wrappers of its best fruit, so that little orange in the corner told the buyer what grade was in the box.

🖨️ The Printer

Schmidt Lithograph started with one man. Max Schmidt was born in Germany in 1850, shipped out as a cabin boy at fourteen, spent six years at sea, and came ashore in San Francisco in 1871. He opened his own lithography shop in 1876, lost his plant to the 1906 earthquake and fire, rebuilt, and from 1907 on ran it as the Schmidt Lithograph Company, with offices and plants that included Los Angeles. That L.A. on the bottom edge is his Los Angeles shop's mark. Crate labels were the heart of the business, and Schmidt kept at it until it joined Stecher-Traung in 1966.

The color on this one is wonderful, and it's a great pick for anybody with roots in Highland, Redlands or the San Bernardino Valley. Put it in a simple frame and it'll hold its own on any wall.