Vintage 1950s Rosebud Crate Label 🌹 P&L Farms Strathmore CA NOS

🌹 "Rosebud" is the most famous last word in movie history, the dying whisper that sends a reporter chasing Charles Foster Kane's life story. This Rosebud is a flower, and it rode out of a Tulare County farm town that once fought the Southern Pacific Railroad to keep its Scottish name. It is a vintage 1950s Rosebud Brand crate label from P & L Farms of Strathmore, California, new old stock that never went onto a box.

📋 What Is Printed on the Label

• GROWN, PACKED AND SHIPPED BY
• P & L FARMS, INC.
• STRATHMORE, CALIF.
• BRAND (in green)
• Rosebud ®
• P&L FARMS (in a green roundel)
• PRODUCE OF U.S.A.

A yellow-orange rosebud just starting to open fills the left end, with a second small bud on its own stem and broad serrated leaves, all on a deep blue ground that runs to the edges. "Rosebud" stands in large cream letters outlined in red, with the word BRAND in green above it. At the right, a cream panel carries painted fruit, among them an orange, a red apple, cherries and a pear, arranged around the green P&L FARMS roundel. Up close the rose petals show the fine dot screen of halftone color printing. The label measures 13" x 4", the long shape made for the end of a lug box.

®️ The Little Circle That Dates It

Look just past the final "d" in Rosebud and there is a small ®. That circled R is a federal trademark registration notice, and in the United States it was introduced by the Trademark Act of 1946, the Lanham Act, signed by President Harry Truman. A packer printing that mark was working in the postwar world, which fits the 1950s date of this Rosebud.

🎬 The Lore: The Other Rosebud

In Citizen Kane (1941), newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane dies whispering "Rosebud," and the whole film is a hunt for what he meant. The answer, shown only to the audience, is his childhood sled, tossed into a furnace as his belongings are cleared out. Orson Welles explained that year that Rosebud was the trade name of the cheap little sled Kane was riding the day he was taken from his mother.

The legends around the word have never stopped. Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz's family later said the name really came from a bicycle stolen from him when he was 10. William Randolph Hearst, who saw himself in Kane, worked relentlessly to suppress the picture. Three of the sleds used on screen survive, and in July 2025 one of them sold at auction for $14.75 million.

🏘️ Strathmore: The Town That Kept Its Name

Strathmore began as a railroad siding. John and Peter Roth came to Tulare County around 1878 from Pennsylvania, by way of Yolo County, and built up thousands of acres along the Tule River. When the Southern Pacific's east-side branch arrived in May 1888, the Roths built a grain-loading platform beside the tracks, and the stop became Roth's Spur. It was briefly called Santos in 1892, and a post office opened as Roth in 1896.

Around 1900-1901 the London-based import-export firm Balfour, Guthrie & Company bought the Roth holdings and renamed the townsite Balfour. The company's agent was Hector Burness, and his wife, Mary Burness, thought the land looked like her home in the Strathmore Valley of Scotland; Strathmore means "broad valley." The name became official in 1903. Then in 1906 the Southern Pacific decided Strathmore was too long for its timetables and renamed the stop Filo. The townspeople hated it. Led by Hector Burness, they fought the railroad and won their name back for good in 1908. Two years later Balfour-Guthrie built the two-story brick Strathmore Block, with shops and a meeting hall, which still stands downtown.

The town has its own outlaw story, too. In 1926 George Pinegar robbed the Pacific Southwest Trust & Savings Bank in Strathmore of $3,000 and ran into McGaffney's orange grove, where deputies found him clinging to a tree branch, frozen with fear. He drew five years to life in San Quentin.

🍊 The Grower-Packer: P & L Farms, Inc.

The label spells out the whole chain in one line of red capitals. One firm raised the fruit, packed it and put it on the road to market, under a brand name carrying the ® of a federal registration. Its fruit panel pictures orchard fruit and citrus side by side beneath that one rose.

🌳 Orange Country on the East Side of the Valley

Strathmore sits in the citrus belt along the east side of Tulare County, between Lindsay and Porterville. Owen Flynn planted some of the first oranges around the town, and Julius Orton set out a few trees northwest of Strathmore in 1889, among the earliest plantings in the Lindsay district. Barbara Roth Flynn, who arrived in 1884 and married Owen Flynn in 1889, lived to 103 in 1965 and became the source for much of what is known about early Strathmore. Packing never left: Porterville Citrus, Inc. runs two packing facilities in Strathmore today, and Villa Park Orchards Association keeps a house there as well.

📦 A Label From the Last Days of the Wooden Box

Paper crate labels were born on the West Coast, in California and Washington, when the transcontinental railroads opened eastern markets to western fruit. By the 1920s offset lithography had replaced stone. World War II drained the crate makers' labor and the printers' metal, and afterward cheap disposable cardboard, with plainer words and pictures printed right on the carton, took over. Paper labels hung on only into the 1950s. This Rosebud comes from that closing stretch and survived because it was never glued to a lug.

❄️ The Impact: The Freeze That Hit the Packing Houses

The citrus towns of this corner of the Valley learned how fragile the business was on December 20, 1990, the first of five straight nights of severe sub-freezing cold, the longest and coldest freeze in California's history and the worst since 1937. By December 26 the estimated citrus loss stood at $280 million, and some 2,000 packinghouse workers were expected to lose their jobs. Farming still defines the county: Tulare County was ranked the top agricultural producer in the United States for 2022, at more than $8.6 billion.

📏 Details

• 🌹 Vintage 1950s Rosebud Brand crate label
• 🍊 P & L Farms, Inc., Strathmore, California
• 📏 13" x 4"
• 🟢 NOS, unused, never applied to a box; little to no edge wear
• 📄 Plain back with the front printing showing faintly through in mirror image

❓ Questions People Ask

Who packed the fruit under this label?
P & L Farms, Inc. of Strathmore, California, which printed that it grew, packed and shipped it.

Is it a citrus label?
Its artwork is not citrus-only: the fruit panel pictures an orange alongside a red apple, cherries and a pear.

How do we know it is postwar?
The ® after Rosebud is the registration notice introduced by the federal Trademark Act of 1946.

Has it been used?
No. It is new old stock and was never pasted onto a box.

How big is it?
13" x 4".

Where does the name Strathmore come from?
Mary Burness, wife of the Balfour-Guthrie agent, named it for the Strathmore Valley in Scotland. The Southern Pacific changed it to Filo in 1906, and the town won it back in 1908.

🖼️ A long, slim frame over a kitchen doorway or along a shelf suits it, or pair it with other Tulare County labels for a Valley gallery wall.