Antique 1930s Sweet Adeline Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potatoes Crate Label 🍠 — Simon Latour, Carencro LA, Bosco Oil Field Section

Who Packed Sweet Adeline Sweet Potatoes? 🍠 Sweet Adeline Brand Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potatoes, Simon Latour, Carencro, Louisiana

Size: 9 1/2" x 9 1/2" ~ Little to no wear.

Adorable! A smiling girl with a strawberry-blonde bob peeking out of a big teal heart, with a pair of fat orange sweet potatoes at her feet. This is an antique 1930s Sweet Adeline crate label for Louisiana Porto Rican sweet potatoes, hand selected and hand packed by Simon Latour of Carencro, Louisiana, "from the Bosco oil field section," and never pasted on a crate. My pictures seriously don't do it justice.

🔍 What's on it

SWEET ADELINE in cream letters arched across the top of a deep navy ground, with U.S. No 1 in red. In the middle, the girl inside a teal heart outlined in yellow. Down the left side, 50 LBS. NET WHEN PACKED and HAND SELECTED and HAND PACKED, and on the right, FROM THE BOSCO OIL FIELD SECTION. At the bottom, the two big sweet potatoes, LOUISIANA PORTO RICAN and SWEET POTATOES in red, and PACKED BY SIMON LATOUR, CARENCRO, LOUISIANA. No printer is named. The back is plain, with the design showing faintly through.

🛢️ Sweet potatoes from oil country

I love that a sweet potato label brags about an oil field! The Bosco field came in in 1934 with Superior Oil Company of California's Hernandez No. 1 discovery well, out in Acadia and St. Landry parishes. That June the trade paper The Oil Weekly was calling it the new Bosco field, with a fast drilling program under way and a nine-mile pipeline being laid from the field to the loading rack at Duson. By 1937 Superior was handling 15,000 barrels of salt water a day there. So this label was printed after the Bosco field came in, and Simon Latour's sweet potatoes came from that oil-field country.

Carencro sits just north of Lafayette in Lafayette Parish. It started out as an Acadian settlement, and the name is usually explained as a Cajun word for the buzzards, the carrion crows, that gathered there. It was real sweet potato country: the Carencro Sweet Potato Co-op was still advertising in the Carencro High School yearbook in 1960, and Simon Latour packed under more than one brand, including one called Twins.

The "Porto Rican" on the label is the sweet potato, not the island. The island's official name became Puerto Rico in 1932, but the favorite Louisiana sweet potato variety kept the old "Porto Rico" spelling for years afterward.

🎶 Sweet Adeline

The name will ring a bell for anybody who ever sang in a barbershop quartet. "Sweet Adeline," with music by Harry Armstrong and words by Richard Gerard, was first published in 1903, and it started life as "You're the Flower of My Heart, Sweet Rosalie." As the story goes, they renamed it after spotting a poster for the farewell tour of the opera singer Adelina Patti. It became a hit in 1904, turned into the barbershop standard, and Boston's mayor John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald made it his theme song in 1909. "You're the flower of my heart," and there's this girl in a heart. I'd like to think that's no accident!

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That sweet face looks great framed in a kitchen or a girl's room, and it's a perfect gift for anybody named Adeline or Addie, a barbershop singer, an oilfield family, or anybody from Carencro, Lafayette or Acadiana.

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