Antique 1930s Snow Owl Brand Apples Crate Label 🦉 Perham Fruit Corporation, Yakima WA — Blue / Red Available

Who Packed Snow Owl Apples? 🦉 Blue or Red, Same Owl

Size: 10 1/2" x 8 1/2" ~ little to no wear.

I carry this label both ways - a deep navy-violet ground and a red-orange one - and you can have either, or both. Same owl, same lettering, same layout; the difference is the color, and by the convention Northwest packers used, that difference meant something: blue for Extra Fancy fruit, red for Fancy. The only other difference between the two is a tiny mark tucked in the lower corner of the blue sheet, too small to read; the red sheet doesn't carry one.

🍎 Perham Fruit Corporation

The label names Perham Fruit Corporation of Yakima, Washington as its DISTRIBUTOR; no printer is named. Ben A. Perham founded the company in 1919, and he was a local boy through and through: born in Hood River, Oregon, in 1879, the youngest of Eugene and Martha Perham's nine children in a pioneer family. He went on to become president of Mount Adams Orchards, where, according to Good Fruit Grower, he built what was at the time the largest d'Anjou pear orchard in the world. In the 1920s, ownership of Mount Adams passed jointly to the Bloxom and Perham families of Yakima, and starting in 1924 it was Perham Fruit Company directing the packing and marketing - an arrangement that lasted until 1948, when the Bloxoms bought out the Perham family's share entirely.

🚢 Apples and Pears, Shipped Far

Perham's fruit traveled. A court case the company brought against Cunard White Star describes Perham shipping seven carloads of pears all the way to Glasgow, Scotland - by rail across the country, then by Cunard steamer across the Atlantic. It's a small detail, but it says something about the reach a Yakima packing house had.

🦢 The Rest of the Perham Flock

Snow Owl had company. The Yakima Valley Libraries' crate-label collection lists Perham's Swan, Pelican, Tulip, Violet and Goldenrod labels, all used in the 1920s and 1930s for Extra Fancy and Fancy apples and pears, so the house seems to have liked birds and flowers on its fruit. All of it grew on irrigation: canals in the 1890s and then the federal Yakima Project, begun in 1905, turned the valley's sagebrush into some of the best apple and pear ground in the country. The company itself was incorporated in Washington on April 2, 1919, and by 1924 it was in front of the state Supreme Court over a railcar of apples, Hansen v. Perham Fruit Co., with the Northern Pacific Railway caught in the middle as garnishee.

🦉 About That Owl

Snowy owls live up in the Arctic, but in some winters they come south in numbers, and they turn up on open farmland and along shorelines in Washington. The adult males are nearly pure white; the females and young birds carry heavy dark barring like the one painted here, so whoever drew this label was looking at the real bird, not a cartoon. Those hard yellow eyes are right, too.

📦 The Box This Label Was Made For

"CONTENTS ONE U.S. BUSHEL" refers to a specific piece of hardware: the standard Northwest apple crate, a softwood box about 10 1/2 inches deep, 11 1/2 inches wide and 18 inches long. Labels like this one were pasted to the end of that crate, and they mostly disappeared once packers switched over to cardboard cartons in the 1950s. Washington State University's library holds five Snow Owl labels in its own collection, donor-dated to around 1940 - roughly the same era this one comes from. A former Perham warehouse building in Zillah, Washington still stands today, now known as Perham Hall.