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Preserving History: Authentic Objects Across Eras
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Alturas Packing Co., Inc. was on Florida's corporate books for sixty-seven years, filed June 17, 1937 and voluntarily dissolved December 16, 2004. By 2017 its old packing house on State Road 60 was one of the empty packinghouses Central Florida's citrus business left behind. This label is what that company put on its fruit: STAR LAKE in tall cream letters under a deep blue sky scattered with yellow stars, one big star bursting at the right-hand edge, and the packer's name set across a green band below. It was never pasted to a crate.
Happy label with a great vibe, and a piece of a Polk County business that is gone.
The corners are clipped, which gives the sheet an eight-sided outline. The S of Star is drawn as a sweeping script initial and the rest of the name stands in bold upright letters; a thin yellow keyline steps down around the lettering where the blue sky meets the green panel. The back is plain paper, and the only thing on it is the front design showing through in reverse. No printer's name and no date appear anywhere on the sheet.
Florida's Division of Corporations record for Alturas Packing Co., Inc. gives a principal address of 3505 Highway 60 East, Bartow, and a mailing address of P.O. Box 65, Alturas. The words the company chose for its label, growers, packers and shippers, describe the whole chain: it grew citrus, packed it and shipped it under its own brands.
Star Lake was not its only brand. The Museum of Florida History's citrus crate label collection holds two others from the same company. One is "Alturas Pride." The other is "AL-PAK-CO," a name the museum explains as short for Alturas Packing Company. The museum catalogues both circa 1937–38, the company's first years.
This is a 1940s label. Nothing on the sheet carries a date, so the dating comes from the company and from the way Florida shipped its fruit. The corporate name printed here, with its "Inc.," was filed in 1937. Florida's paper crate labels were on the way out after World War II, when shortages of wood and metal ended the wooden crate and cardboard boxes arrived with brand names printed straight onto them; Florida Southern College's citrus label archive puts the last labels at 1956. The flat four-colour design, bold lettering and simple starry field sit right in that window.
Bartow began in October 1851 as Fort Blount, a stockade built by Readding Blount. Polk County was split from Hillsborough County in 1861 with Fort Blount as its seat, and in 1867 the county commissioners renamed the town for General Francis S. Bartow, the first Confederate officer to die in the Civil War. Bartow is still the county seat, and phosphate, citrus and cattle have long carried the local economy. After a run of hard freezes north of Polk County, Polk went on to become the leading citrus county in the United States.
Alturas, whose name is Spanish for "heights," is the rural community between Bartow and Lake Wales where the company kept its post office box. The Alturas area has its own Star Lake, a 44-acre lake, and a Star Lake Road runs through the same countryside.
Florida label collectors pass along a rule of thumb from the years after 1937: the background colour of a label told the buyer the grade of fruit in the box. The story goes that a mostly blue background stood for Grade A, red for Grade B, and yellow or green for the lower or mixed grades. Some say the picture carried a message too, and that a happy dog or a sad dog on a label could hint at a good crop or a poor one. Star Lake's sky is that deep blue from edge to edge.
Citrus crate labels first appeared in California in the late 1880s, and Florida picked up the idea for its own growers. Most Florida labels were printed at Florida Grower Press in Tampa, although lithographers from as far away as St. Louis, Nashville and San Francisco also printed for Florida houses. The usual Florida label ran 9" x 9", with 6" x 6" and 7" x 7" half-box labels and 3 1/2" x 9" strips also in use.
The same decade that retired the wooden crate changed Florida citrus for good. Scientists at the Citrus Experiment Station at Lake Alfred, Louis G. MacDowell, Edwin L. Moore and C. D. Atkins, worked out a process for frozen concentrated orange juice in the 1940s and patented it in 1948. The station's research went on to build a billion-dollar processed juice industry.
The labels themselves outlived the crates. The Museum of Florida History, the University of Florida and Florida Southern College all keep collections, and today the labels are treated as works of art and a pictorial record of the Florida that printed them. The lithography on these labels is unparalleled even to this day, in my opinion.
It is a 1940s label. Its packer, Alturas Packing Co., Inc., was incorporated in 1937, and Florida's paper crate labels were retired as cardboard boxes took over, with the last ones used in 1956.
On Highway 60 East in Bartow, Polk County, Florida, with its mailing address in nearby Alturas. The label itself reads BARTOW (Polk County) FLORIDA, U. S. A.
There is a 44-acre Star Lake in the Alturas area of Polk County, along with a Star Lake Road.
The label names oranges, grapefruit and tangerines.
No. It was never applied to a crate; the back is plain paper with the design showing through.
8 1/2" x 5 1/2" ~, a good size for a small frame in a kitchen, breakfast nook or Florida room.
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