Vintage 1940s Lake Wenatchee Crate Label 🏔️ Captures Scenic Beauty

Who Packed Lake Wenatchee Pears? 🏔️ Lake Wenatchee Brand Pears, Cascoa Growers, Cashmere, Washington

Size: 10" x 7 1/2" ~ Unused, never pasted on a box.

This lake is absolutely gorgeous in real life and on this label! This is a vintage 1940s Lake Wenatchee Brand pear crate label, packed and shipped by Cascoa Growers of Cashmere, Washington. Three big blushing orange pears hang on a leafy branch at the left, and through a window beside them you look out over a green mountain lake with a little log cabin on the shore, two tall pines, and purple, snow-capped peaks with a pink sky behind them. It's all set on a deep maroon ground, with Lake WENATCHEE across the top and PEARS across the bottom in bright yellow. My pictures seriously don't do it justice.

🔍 What's on it

Lake WENATCHEE with a small BRAND tucked under the end, CONTENTS 4/5 BUSHEL in red on the right, PEARS in big yellow letters, PACKED & SHIPPED BY CASCOA GROWERS, CASHMERE, WASH., and PRODUCE OF U.S.A. in red along the bottom. There's a tiny line of red print down in the lower left corner that's too small to read. The back is plain paper with the lettering showing faintly through.

🌲 The lake at the head of the valley

Lake Wenatchee is a real place and a beauty: about 2,480 acres of water up in Chelan County near Leavenworth, 244 feet deep at its deepest, with Lake Wenatchee State Park at its east end and Dirty Face Mountain looking down on it. It's where the Wenatchee River starts. From the lake the river runs 53 miles southeast, past Plain, Leavenworth, Peshastin and Dryden, right through Cashmere, and on through Monitor and Wenatchee to the Columbia. So when a Cashmere packer put Lake Wenatchee on its pear label, it was naming the top of its own valley. The label doesn't say the painted lake is meant to be Lake Wenatchee, but it sure looks like the kind of view you get up there.

🍐 Cashmere, named for a poem

Cashmere started out as Mission, or Old Mission, after the Catholic missions built for the Wenatchi people along Mission Creek. The post office came in 1889, and the Great Northern Railway came through in 1892, the year the town was platted. Trouble was, half the Northwest seemed to have a town called Mission, and the mail and the trains kept getting mixed up. So Judge James Harvey Chase, a former elocution teacher famous for his public readings, suggested a new name out of a poem he loved, Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, which rhapsodizes about the mountain beauty of the Vale of Kashmir. The town took the name Cashmere on July 1, 1904, and incorporated that November, and folks called the judge "Cashmere's grand old man" in his later years.

Fruit made the town. Pioneers started digging the Peshastin Ditch around 1889 and it brought its first water to the slopes above Cashmere in 1901. By 1906 The Coast magazine was calling Cashmere one of the prettiest and most prosperous fruit districts in the state, after it shipped 135 carloads of fruit the season before. All that fruit needed boxes, and in 1902 Frederick Schmitten opened a box factory in nearby Brender Canyon, then a full lumber mill in town in 1910. Labels like this one went on the ends of those boxes. And if you've ever had Aplets & Cotlets, those fruit-and-nut candies come from Cashmere too.

🏡 Display

Crate Labels are a reminder of a bygone era but the amazing lithography process 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. What is left is what there is. Once the last of these are on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire, and no one is printing more.

Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum! It's a natural for a cabin, a lake house, a kitchen, or anybody from Cashmere, Leavenworth, Wenatchee and the rest of the valley. This is within 20 years of full antique status.