Antique 1931 Independent Brand Pear Crate Label 🔔 — Yakima Washington, Liberty Bell Patriotic Art

Who Packed Independent Brand Pears in Yakima? 🔔 Liberty on a Crate of Yakima Pears

Size: 10" x 7" ~ little to no edge wear

This label wraps a box of Northwest fruit in the American founding itself. It's an Independent Brand pear label, with Washington Fruit & Produce Company of Yakima, Washington named as the distributor, and the Liberty Bell, crack and all, as its emblem. "Independent" is the brand, and the banner reads "Northwest Pears."

🏢 Washington Fruit of Yakima

The shipper is named right on the label, in the distributor line: "Distributed by Washington Fruit & Produce Co., Yakima, Washington, U.S.A." "Produce of U.S.A." is printed there too. What I find most interesting is that this is not a vanished firm. Washington Fruit & Produce is one of the great survivors of the American fruit trade. Fred B. Plath incorporated it in 1916 to grow, pack and ship Yakima Valley apples, pears and peaches, and over a hundred years later it is still owned and run by a family in Yakima, a pillar of Washington's tree-fruit industry. So this little pear label belongs to a long, unbroken story, printed when the firm was already a going concern with the better part of a century still ahead of it.

The setting is among the most famous fruit districts on earth. The Yakima Valley sits in south-central Washington: high desert turned green by irrigation, with long, warm, sunny days, cool nights and volcanic soil, a combination that made it the heart of Pacific Northwest apple and pear country. Starting in the early twentieth century, its packing houses graded and boxed the fruit and sent it off by rail to the rest of the country and around the world, and "Northwest Pears," as the label says, were among its signature crops. Washington Fruit was one of the valley's foundational shippers, and a brand like Independent served as its signature in far-off markets.

I get a quiet satisfaction from handling the trade dress of a company that is still in business. Most crate labels are the last trace of firms long gone, but Independent is a chapter from a story still being written: the early brand of a Yakima house that helped build an industry and never left it.

🖽️ Why "Independent," and Why the Liberty Bell

Name and picture fit together perfectly. Call a brand "Independent," put the Liberty Bell on it, the bell that tradition says rang out for American independence, and you have wrapped a crate of pears in the whole language of liberty, self-reliance and national pride. Against the big grower cooperatives the name carried an extra wink, too: this was fruit from an independent house, standing on its own. A buyer in a wholesale market ran his eye over dozens of stacked crates in a few seconds, and a brand lived or died by whether its label could stop that glance; few American symbols win instant recognition and goodwill the way the Liberty Bell does. It is patriotic salesmanship of the most confident kind, and it still reads clearly today.

🍐 What the Label Shows

An Independent Brand label, with the Liberty Bell as the emblem and "Northwest Pears" on the banner. Its distributor line reads Washington Fruit & Produce Co., Yakima, Washington, with Produce of U.S.A. alongside, and it also prints Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and Contents 4/5 U.S. Bushel. The format is horizontal, landscape-style, sized for the end of a pear box.

📅 The Label Dates Itself: Copyright 1931

Here the paper tells you its own age. A copyright line is printed in small type at the foot of the design, between "Washington Fruit" and "& Produce Co.": "Copyright 1931." So the design was registered in 1931, which puts the label in the early 1930s, a genuine pre-war fruit label from a Washington Fruit that was already fifteen years established.

📦 Genuinely Old, Never Used

Why does a label this old still look so crisp? It was never used. Northwest fruit traveled in nailed wooden boxes, and every box wanted its own pasted paper label, so packers ordered them by the thousand and kept big stacks on hand. Then pre-printed cardboard cartons arrived, with the brand printed straight onto the box, and the paper labels became obsolete; the surplus was set aside and forgotten in storerooms. Independent labels like these are survivors of that stock: never pasted, with the reverse blank apart from a faint ghost of the front bleeding through, and the color as fresh as the day it was printed.