Antique 1930s Miramar Brand Sunkist Lemon Crate Label 🍋 Montecito California, Crocker-Sperry

Who Packed Miramar Brand Lemons in Montecito? 🍋 MIRAMAR Brand — Crocker-Sperry Co., Montecito, California

Size: 12 1/2" x 9" ~ Unused stock, clean backs with just the mirrored ghost of the printing showing through, square corners.

An unused lemon crate label, grown and packed by the Crocker-Sperry Co. of Montecito, Santa Barbara County. The brand is MIRAMAR, in tall red serif capitals across the top with BRAND set small beneath it. "Sunkist" appears once, in outlined navy serif letters on the tissue wrapper around the lemon at lower left — that was the mark of the California Fruit Growers Exchange, the statewide growers' cooperative, printed as part of the picture rather than as the packer's own brand. Two marketing systems sharing one sheet of paper.

🏖️ The Picture

A chromolithograph inside a deep blue border with a thin gold inner rule. Violet mountains rise behind rolling green hills, a ranch house sits among trees, and ordered rows of citrus run down to red sandstone bluffs with blue-green surf breaking on the rocks below. Whether this exact view is the ranch's own coastline or simply the idea of one, it sold the place as much as the fruit — a crate arriving at a Chicago grocery in February carried a picture of a coastline in permanent summer.

At lower left, in pale microtype on the blue border below the gold rule, the lithographer signed it: SCHMIDT LITHO. CO. L.A. — the Los Angeles branch of the Schmidt Lithograph Company, one of the two main printers of California citrus labels along with Western Lithograph.

🏛️ Crocker-Sperry Co.

In 1887, William H. Crocker and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Caroline Sperry, bought Rancho Las Fuentes in Montecito and put it into citrus. André Poniatowski, a Pole of noble lineage who married into the Sperry family, became a partner in 1894. The packing house they built served ranches up and down the South Coast until it closed in 1942; the ranch then passed to the four Poniatowski sons, one of whom, Casimir, became ranch manager. The company shipped under several brands, Miramar among them, with Summerland and Las Fuentes the others. Its name is still on the Santa Barbara map as Crocker Sperry Drive.

🍋 Twenty-Eight Thousand Lemon Trees

The Crocker in the name was William H. Crocker, the San Francisco banker, son of the railroad man Charles Crocker, and the Sperry was his wife's family, the flour-milling Sperrys. When they bought the land in Montecito in 1887 it was more than 218 acres of olive trees. Some 25,000 olives came out and about 28,000 lemon trees went in, and by the early 1900s the ranch ran past 250 acres, most of it in lemons. The ranch took its name, Las Fuentes, "the fountains," from all the artesian wells on it.

Work on the packing house began in 1891, designed by the San Francisco architect A. Page Brown and built of hand-cut local stone, possibly by Chinese laborers, and it was running by 1894. Elizabeth Sperry Poniatowski inherited her mother's share in 1897, and the family held the ranch until 1964, when it was sold and the old stone packing house became the clubhouse of the Birnam Wood Golf Club. Santa Barbara County made it Historical Landmark No. 21 in 1981. So the building that packed the fruit behind this label is still standing, with golfers in it now instead of lemons.

If you already have a Summerland or a Las Fuentes sheet, you will know the house style on sight — the same coastal restraint, the same confident brand lettering.