Antique to Vintage 1930s-1950s Ivanhoe California Crate Label Set 🛡️ Knight, Lady Rowena, Robin Hood, Splendid Lemons, Klink

🛡️ How Did a California Town Called Klink End Up Named for a Knight? Four Fruit Crate Labels From Ivanhoe, Tulare County

Size: Ivanhoe 10 1/2" x 4", Lady Rowena 13" x 4", Robin Hood 13" x 4", Splendid Lemons 12" x 9" ~ All four never used, little to no wear.

A book named a school, the school named a town, and the town named its fruit after the people in the book. That's the whole story of Ivanhoe, California, and it's why a farm town in the San Joaquin Valley shipped its crops under a knight in armor, a Saxon lady on horseback and Robin Hood himself. The fourth label in this set is the one that gives the game away: Splendid Lemons, packed by the Klink Citrus Association, still wearing the town's old name.

In case you've never run into one, a crate label is the big paper picture glued to the end of a wooden fruit crate. It did the selling. A wholesale buyer looking down a row of stacked boxes in Chicago or Pittsburgh in the middle of winter saw the label before he ever saw the fruit, so packers made them as loud and pretty as they could. These four never got glued to anything. That's what new old stock means: old, but never used. Each piece comes from my stack of unused ones. They aren't one timeframe either. Ivanhoe and Splendid are from the 1930s, and Lady Rowena and Robin Hood are from the 1950s.

🚂 A School, a Railroad Auditor and a Book

The first school out there opened on April 5, 1886, and it was named Ivanhoe after Sir Walter Scott's novel. Two years later the Southern Pacific Railroad named its side track at the same spot Klink, after George Klink, one of its auditors, the men who checked the company's books. So for years you had Ivanhoe School sitting at a place called Klink. Locals tell a second version: spent coal from a steam engine is called clinker, and it's said the railroad dumped a good deal of it along that stretch of line, so the name and the cinder heaps have been tied together in the town's telling ever since. By the middle of the 1920s the school's name had won, and the story around town credits a Mrs. Boaz with suggesting it. The Tulare County Historical Society thought the old name was worth remembering and put up a marker to it in 1986.

Ivanhoe sits about ten miles northeast of Visalia, on the east side of the Central Valley where the groves run toward the Sierra. Once irrigation water reached it, cattle ranches and grain fields gave way to orchards of citrus and other fruit. The fruit association on three of these labels was just what it sounds like: neighbors pooling their crop to be packed, graded and shipped under shared brands, so a small grower's fruit went to market with the same bright label as everyone else's. And the Ivanhoe Fruit Association leaned hard into the town's name.

🛡️ The Knight: Ivanhoe Brand, 1930s

Scott's Ivanhoe came out in December 1819 and is set in England in 1194, among one of the last old English noble families, the Saxons, in a country run by the Normans who had conquered it. Its hero is Wilfred of Ivanhoe. The book got so big that twenty years later a Scottish earl, Archibald Montgomerie, staged a full medieval tournament at Eglinton Castle, with features taken straight from the novel. He expected about 4,000 spectators and roughly 100,000 came. Then, just as the Queen of Beauty was announced by trumpets on opening day, a violent rainstorm broke, the knights got soaked and the field turned to mud. His granddaughter later said he had spent most of the wealth of the estate on it. I love picturing that earl and this label in the same story: a knight on a white horse, a hundred and some years later, selling California fruit.

One thing to know before you frame it. The big circle on the left isn't printed. It's a round hole cut clean through the paper, so whatever sits behind the label shows through. Pick your mat color with that in mind, because it becomes part of the picture. Robin Hood has the same round cutout.

👑 The Lady: Lady Rowena Brand Emperor Grapes, 1950s

Very neat medieval image of a Lady watching a duel! Rowena is the Saxon princess in the novel, and at the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Ivanhoe names her Queen of Love and Beauty. She marries him at the end. EMPERORS, printed in red, is the grape: a big late-season red table grape that shipped so well it kept the market going into winter. NET WEIGHT 28 LBS. is what was in the box.

That yellow circle on the right is the emblem of the California Fruit Exchange, a growers' co-operative (a business owned by the farmers who sold through it) formed on May 1, 1901. One of its founders, George H. Cutter, suggested the anchor as a symbol as early as 1903, it was first used in 1904, and it was registered as a trademark in 1923 for the top grade of fruit. At its peak the Exchange spoke for around a thousand growers selling into more than three hundred North American markets and twenty-two countries overseas. In 1969 it renamed itself Blue Anchor, Inc., and it carried on until 2000.

🏹 The Outlaw: Robin Hood Brand, 1950s

In Scott's novel, Robin Hood walks in as an archer called Locksley, wins the archery contest at the tournament and later leads his outlaws against the castle of Torquilstone. The legend is far older than the book. "Rymes of Robyn Hood" are already mentioned in Piers Plowman in the late 1370s. But Ivanhoe helped turn him into a Saxon standing up to Norman lords, with King Richard himself hailing him as "King of Outlaws and prince of good fellows," and that book did a lot to shape the Robin Hood most of us still picture today. A label this long and narrow, about 13 by 4 inches, was made for the end of a lug box, a shallow crate used for table grapes and vegetables. Citrus packers used a much squarer label, which is exactly what you see on the next one.

🍋 The Old Name: Splendid Lemons, 1930s

If you ever wanted to bottle up the California dream and paste it on the end of a wooden box, this is pretty much how you'd do it. A fat cluster of lemons with the blossoms still on, a road running off between rows of trees toward a Spanish house with a red tile roof, and the mountains going purple with snow on top. It was made to sell lemons to a wholesale buyer in the middle of winter. Along the gold band it says Packed by Klink Citrus Association, Ivanhoe, Tulare County, California. So there it is: the old town name and the new town name on one line. The citrus growers never let Klink go. A 1940s photograph of the Ivanhoe Fruit Association's packing plant, known locally as F.A.P., identifies it as the forerunner of Klink's Citrus in Ivanhoe, which ties these two packers together in one small town.

It was printed by Western Litho. Co. of Los Angeles, founded in 1899, a shop that made its living mostly on California citrus labels. Brown & Bigelow bought it in 1953, and by about 1955 it was gone, right around the time the California citrus business quit wooden crates and paper labels for good. Copies of this design are held by the Center for Sacramento History and by Azusa Pacific University, so you're in good company hanging one on the wall.

📦 Why These Survived

A crate label had one job: get glued to a box that went to market and got broken up or thrown away. Once printed cardboard cartons replaced wooden crates, packing houses had no more use for their paper labels, and the unused stock left behind in warehouses is where labels like these come from. Crate labels are a reminder of a bygone era, but the amazing lithography process, printing the color one layer at a time, 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 these out to preserve their history. My pictures seriously don't do them justice. Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum! There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections and galleries, they will be very hard to track down for sale.