Antique 1930s Our Pick Crate Label 🐓 — Loomis Fruit Growers Association, Loomis California, Rooster Art

Who Packed Our Pick Fruit in Loomis? 🐓 "Our Pick," Loomis Fruit Growers Association, Loomis, California

Size: 11" x 3 1/2" ~ Minor edge/corner wear on the few left.

This colorful label doesn't need me to say a word. Amazing decor! This is an antique 1930s "Our Pick" crate label, packed and shipped by the Loomis Fruit Growers Association out of Loomis, California. A big white rooster with a bright red comb struts across a dark hillside inside a deep blue circle, head down, eyeing a shallow green bowl heaped with fruit: round orange and red fruits, a yellow pear and a bunch of dark grapes. "Our Pick" runs across the red strip in huge cream letters, quotation marks and all, and the association's name sits beside it in yellow.

My pictures seriously don't do it justice.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• "Our Pick" (the quotation marks are part of the mark)
• HAND PACKED
• LOOMIS FRUIT GROWERS ASSOCIATION
• GROWERS, PACKERS & SHIPPERS
• LOOMIS, CALIFORNIA.
• CARTON LABEL CORP S.F. (the printer, Carton Label Corp of San Francisco, in tiny type in the corner)

It never names a fruit in type, and it never says "brand," either. The fruit is all in the picture, which makes sense for a growers' association that shipped plums, peaches and pears.

🍑 High-Hand and Our Pick

The Loomis Fruit Growers Association was incorporated on April 29, 1901, with 18 charter members, and it was the very first member association of the California Fruit Exchange, the statewide growers' co-op. It shipped under two labels, and this is the fun part. The High-Hand label went on the association's very best fruit (it was in use by 1923 and registered as a trademark in 1926), and "Our Pick" went on the crates of the grade just below it. So "Our Pick" was the growers' own pick of the rest, still hand packed.

These folks took their packing seriously. In 1923 the association set up a quality-control system to inspect the packing out on the ranches, and in 1926 it built a modern, highly mechanized Central Packing House, the High Hand fruit sheds, where up to 100 workers packed during harvest season. Workers' names are still written on the posts and rafters of that building today. Somewhere along the way the association left the California Fruit Exchange, and in 1928 the Exchange set up its own Loomis Agency in town. The Loomis Fruit Growers kept going until 2001, when it closed as the last operating fruit shed in all of Placer County.

🚂 Loomis, the Fruit Town

Loomis went through a few names before it settled on this one. A Placer post office opened on the site in 1861, it became Smithville in 1862 and Pino in 1869, and in 1890 the Southern Pacific finally settled on Loomis, after one of the town's pioneers, James Loomis, who was the saloon keeper, the railroad agent, the express agent and the postmaster all at once. That's a busy man.

In the early 1900s Loomis was the second largest fruit-shipping station in Placer County, sending out plums, peaches and pears from the foothill orchards, and in the 1940s the Loomis district shipped 4,500 train cars of plums every summer. The High Hand and Blue Goose packing sheds still stand between Taylor Road and the tracks, and the town itself didn't incorporate until December 17, 1984.

🏡 Display

Crate Labels are a reminder of a bygone era but the amazing lithography process 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 these out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries then they will be very difficult to acquire.

Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum! The long strip shape fits right over a kitchen doorway or a window, and it's a perfect gift for a chicken lover or anybody from Loomis and Placer County.