Antique 1920s Orange Cove Fruits Crate Label 🍇 Grapes and Oranges, Orange Cove District Central California

Who Packed Orange Cove Fruits? 🍇 Grapes and Oranges "Famous for Flavor" from the Orange Cove District, Central California

Size: 9" x 3 3/4" ~ Little to no wear.

I've got a soft spot for a label that tries to sell a whole town, and this antique 1920s Orange Cove Fruits label does exactly that. It isn't one packer bragging about one brand. It's two outfits sharing one long, skinny strip of paper: the Orange Cove Fruit Growers Assn. packing the district's grapes under its Sovereign, Foothill and Growers brands, and the Orange Cove Citrus Assn. packing the oranges under Orange Cove-Souvenir and O. C. Over all of it runs the district's boast, "Famous for Flavor," and down in the margin, in type you need a magnifying glass for, the printer signed it: Western Litho. Co., Los Angeles.

My favorite part is the little sales pitch printed right in the middle. The growers wanted you to know their district sat against the Sierra Nevada foothills, "almost in the shadow" of the "famous old Sequoia Redwood Trees," and then they named three of them: General Grant, General Lee and General Sherman. That's a fruit packer name-dropping the biggest trees on the planet, and I love the nerve of it.

🌲 The Three Generals

Those three are real trees, and two of them are about as famous as a tree can get. The General Grant, up in what is now Kings Canyon National Park, was named in 1867 for Ulysses S. Grant. President Calvin Coolidge made it the Nation's Christmas Tree on April 28, 1926, and in 1956 President Eisenhower declared it a National Shrine, the only living thing ever given that honor. The Robert E. Lee Tree stands in the same grove. Richard Field, who had been a lieutenant in the Confederate army, named it around 1875, and it is the eleventh largest giant sequoia in the world.

The General Sherman, over in Sequoia National Park in Tulare County, is the champion: the largest known living single-stem tree on Earth by volume. The story goes that the naturalist James Wolverton named it in 1879 for General William Tecumseh Sherman, having served under him as a lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Cavalry, though that tale may be more legend than record. And for a few years it wasn't the General Sherman at all. In 1886 the Kaweah Colony, a utopian socialist community that made its living logging those mountains, took over the land and renamed it the Karl Marx Tree. The old name came back after the colony broke up in 1892. That's the kind of neighborhood this fruit grew up in.

🍊 Orange Cove, Fresno County

Orange Cove sits in Fresno County, right where the label says it does, against the foothills on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley. The Orosi Orange Land Company started cutting the land into parcels in 1913, and the Santa Fe built a depot there that same year, a standard-plan station that cost $8,000. The town grew up around that depot. Elmer M. Sheridan, remembered as the town's founder, gave Orange Cove its name in 1914, before the big citrus plantings had even gone in, and the post office opened that year too. The city incorporated in 1948. The old Santa Fe depot closed in October 1977, went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and today it's Orange Cove City Hall.

In 1916 the local orange growers banded together as the Orange Cove Citrus Association, so they could pack and sell their fruit as one. The association took its Souvenir brand all the way to the U.S. Patent Office, filing in April 1948 and getting it registered in November 1949. It kept the Orange Cove Citrus Association name until 1973, when it joined the Sanger Citrus Association, founded in 1920, to form the Orange Cove-Sanger Citrus Association, which is still packing oranges there. The grapes went through their own outfit, the Orange Cove Fruit Growers Association, and that's why this label speaks for both crops. The district took a hard hit in the freeze of the winter of 1990-91, when much of the citrus crop was lost, and the groves came back.

The printer, the Western Lithograph Company, was one of the big Los Angeles label houses. It opened in 1899 and ran until Brown-Bigelow bought it out in 1953, and its little signature turns up in the margins of crate labels from all over the state.

Because it's so long and narrow, nine inches by under four, this one fits places a square crate label never will: over a kitchen window, along a shelf edge, in a slim frame by the back door. And if anybody in your family has ever stood at the foot of the General Sherman and craned their neck, I think this is their label.