Antique 1930s Ivanhoe Brand Fancy California Fruits Crate Label 🛡️ Ivanhoe CA, Knight in Armor on White Horse Art

Who Packed Ivanhoe Brand California Fruit? 🛡️ A Knight Out of Sir Walter Scott, Sent to Market on a Crate of California Fruit

Size: 10 1/2" x 4"

In December 1819 Sir Walter Scott published Ivanhoe, the novel of Saxon knights, tournaments and Robin Hood that later drove a Scottish earl to stage a real joust and filled movie palaces a century and more after it was written. In the 1930s, a fruit association in the Tulare County town of Ivanhoe, California, put its own knight on the end of its crates. This is that label: an original Ivanhoe Brand crate label from the Ivanhoe Fruit Ass'n, never pasted to a box.

🏷️ What Is Printed on This Label

• Brand: Ivanhoe, with BRAND in small red capitals beneath
• Banner: FANCY CALIFORNIA FRUITS, red lettering on a yellow ribbon with green folds
• Packer: IVANHOE FRUIT ASS'N · IVANHOE, CALIFORNIA, in pale blue
• Also printed: PRODUCE OF U.S.A.
• Art: a knight in steel armor and a gold-trimmed red surcoat, plume on his helmet and lance in hand, riding a white horse dressed in red and gold
• Panels: a blank green bar under the banner, and a large round opening at the left
• Made: color lithograph on paper, 1930s
• Condition: new old stock, never applied to a crate; the back is blank

Everything sits on a solid black ground, which is why the colors jump. The word Ivanhoe is built from chunky yellow letters with orange shadows and white edges, as if they were carved from wood and stood up in a row. The horse fills the middle of the label, its bridle and breastplate studded with gold rivets. The knight sits tall behind it, looking straight out at the buyer, his red plume blowing back.

One practical note before framing: the big circle on the left is not a printed shape. It is a round hole die-cut clean through the sheet, so whatever sits behind the label shows through it. Pick your mat color with that in mind; it becomes part of the picture.

⚔️ The Novel Behind the Knight

Ivanhoe was released on 20 December 1819 and issued in London on the 29th by Hurst, Robinson and Co., with 1820 on its title page. Scott set it in England in 1194, among one of the last Saxon noble families in a country ruled by Normans. Its hero is Wilfred of Ivanhoe. Around him move Rowena, the Saxon princess; Rebecca, the daughter of Isaac of York and a gifted healer; Robin of Locksley; and Richard the Lionheart, riding in disguise as the Black Knight.

Scott changed an English legend while he was at it. The modern picture of Robin Hood as a cheerful, decent, patriotic rebel owes a great deal to Ivanhoe. Scott named him Robin of Locksley, set him in the years of the Crusades, and pitted Saxon against Norman, and most of the Robin Hood stories told since have followed his lead.

🌧️ The Joust That Drowned

The book's most spectacular legacy came twenty years after it was published. On 28 to 30 August 1839, Archibald Montgomerie, the 13th Earl of Eglinton, staged a full medieval tournament at Eglinton Castle in Ayrshire, Scotland, meant as a living re-enactment of the romances, with features taken straight from Ivanhoe. He expected about 4,000 spectators. Roughly 100,000 came, swamping the roads and inns. Prince Louis Napoleon, the future Emperor of the French, was among the guests, and the Marquess of Waterford and the Earl of Cassillis rode as knights.

Then, just as Lady Somerset, the Queen of Beauty, was announced by trumpets on opening day, a violent rainstorm broke. The knights were soaked, the lists turned to mud and the grandstand roof gave way to the water. A second day of jousting went ahead on August 30 in better weather, but the earl's granddaughter later said he had spent most of the wealth of the estate on it. The washout still helped spark the Gothic revival and the historical re-enactments that followed.

Hollywood came back to the story in 1952. MGM's Ivanhoe, directed by Richard Thorpe with Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine and George Sanders, earned three Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, set an opening-week record at Radio City Music Hall, and became MGM's top earner of the year.

🏢 The Ivanhoe Fruit Association and Its Storybook Brands

The Ivanhoe Fruit Ass'n leaned into its town's name. Besides this armored rider, it packed fruit under a Lady Rowena label, named for the novel's Saxon heroine and showing her on horseback while knights battle. It had a Robin Hood brand too, after the outlaw Scott wrote into the story as Robin of Locksley. A crate buyer in a big-city produce market would have seen a whole shelf of chivalry coming out of one small California town.

Ivanhoe is an unincorporated community in Tulare County, out in the San Joaquin Valley about ten miles northeast of Visalia. It first appeared as a named place in the 1950 U.S. census, became a census-designated place in 1980, and counted 4,468 people in 2020. The town's name goes back to its first school, opened on April 5, 1886 and named Ivanhoe after Sir Walter Scott's novel. Once irrigation water reached Ivanhoe, its cattle ranches and grain fields gave way to orchards of citrus and deciduous fruit. Tulare County is farm country on a grand scale: in 2001 it became the most productive county in the United States by agricultural revenue, at US$3.5 billion a year, overtaking Fresno County after more than twenty years on top. Dairy brings in more than US$1 billion a year there, and oranges and grapes are among its big earners, watered in part by the Kaweah River coming down from the Sierra.

Ivanhoe's citrus packers carried on too: in 2000 the Ivanhoe Citrus Association merged with the Exeter Citrus Association to become the Exeter-Ivanhoe Citrus Association. The Ivanhoe Fruit Association's own 1940s packing plant, known locally as F.A.P., was the forerunner of Klink's Citrus.

📦 Why a Label Like This Was Never Used

Paper crate labels started out on the West Coast, in California and Washington, in the 1880s. Each one was pasted onto the end of a stackable wooden shipping crate, where it did the selling for a grower or a packing house. Lithography companies turned them out by the thousands, first from stone and later on offset presses.

World War II took the workers away from crate makers and the metals away from printers, and packers had to cut costs. Produce moved into cheap, disposable cardboard boxes, and the wooden crate and its paper label faded out. Labels were never meant to be saved, so the leftover, unused sheets are the ones collectors treasure today for their history and their color.

❓ Questions People Ask

Who packed Ivanhoe Brand fruit?
The Ivanhoe Fruit Association, whose name and town are printed along the bottom of the label.

How old is this label?
It is a 1930s label, new old stock, never pasted on a crate.

Is the circle a hole?
Yes. It is die-cut through the paper, not printed.

Why a knight?
The town shares its name with Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel Ivanhoe, and the association used characters from the book on its brands, including Lady Rowena and Robin Hood.

What fruit went in the crate?
The label says only Fancy California Fruits, so it could dress more than one kind.

Where is Ivanhoe?
In Tulare County, in the San Joaquin Valley, the southern half of California's Central Valley farm country, about ten miles northeast of Visalia.

Who will love it?
Crate label collectors, fans of knights and medieval romance, readers of Scott, Tulare County families, and anyone building a bold kitchen or den wall. The black ground frames beautifully.