Antique 1910s Home of Ramona Citrus Crate Label 🍊 — Camulos, Ventura County CA — U. F. del Valle, Copyrighted 1900

Who Was Ramona? 🍊 Antique 1910s Home of Ramona Citrus Crate Label, Camulos, Ventura County CA

Size: 11" x 10" ~ Little to no wear.

🍊 The Label

This is a "Home of Ramona" citrus crate label from Rancho Camulos in Ventura County, California. Across the top it reads HOME OF RAMONA BRAND, with TRADE and MARK set around it; underneath the picture, U. F. del Valle as the shipper's credit line, and COPYRIGHTED 1900. Along the bottom, CAMULOS, VENTURA CO. CALIFORNIA., and in microtype at the lower right of the picture, the printer's imprint, SCHMIDT LITHO CO LOS ANGELES CAL. The picture shows a long, low adobe house with a red-tiled roof and a covered veranda, two small figures in its shade (one standing in a long white dress, one sitting in a red hat), a flowering century plant, climbing roses, and a sandy path — the Camulos ranch house itself, printed right on its own fruit.

🏡 Rancho Camulos and the del Valle Family

Camulos sits in the Santa Clara River Valley, about two miles east of Piru, just north of the river. The ranch's story starts back in Mexican California: on January 22, 1839, Governor Juan B. Alvarado granted the 48,612-acre Rancho San Francisco to Antonio del Valle, the administrator of Mission San Fernando, and when Antonio died in 1841 his son Ygnacio inherited it. The del Valles held Camulos from that 1839 grant until they sold the ranch in 1924. Ygnacio del Valle built the adobe in 1853 and planted the county's first Valencia orange seedlings in 1857, a gift from his friend, the citrus pioneer William Wolfskill. By the 1860s Camulos was a working ranch of about 1,800 acres — oranges, almonds, walnuts, apricots, wheat, corn and barley — with ninety acres in vineyard for the ranch's own wine and brandy, though it had narrowed to around 1,290 acres by the time Ygnacio died in 1880.

📖 How Camulos Became the "Home of Ramona"

Helen Hunt Jackson spent only a couple of hours at Camulos in 1882, but she noticed everything, down to the tear in the chapel's altar cloth — and those details found their way into her 1884 novel Ramona, a sensation that sent readers looking for the "real" Ramona. Jackson meant the book as a protest — she hoped it would do for Native Americans what Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for the enslaved — but most readers fell for its romance of old Spanish and Mexican California instead, all padres, señoritas and caballeros, and they wanted to see the place for themselves. By 1886 Camulos was widely taken as the ranch behind the story, and the family, who had at first opened their doors and fed and housed the visitors who came looking, branded their oranges the "Home of Ramona" and put their own veranda on the label. But the pilgrims kept coming, and by February 1896 Ulpiano F. del Valle (1865-1936) — the U. F. del Valle credited on this very label — had had enough. Three hundred excursionists off a single Santa Barbara train had raided the orchards, stolen oranges, and walked into the house; one woman lay down on a bed and told everyone she'd "laid on Ramona's bed." Del Valle closed Camulos to tourists that month, writing in the local paper, "patience has ceased to be a virtue." Southern Pacific conductors had been calling out "Camulos! Home of Ramona!" as the train crossed the ranch since the 1880s, and visitors kept asking where "Ramony" was. The brand stayed proprietary to Camulos until 1914, when the family assigned it to the newly formed Piru Citrus Association — so a Camulos-marked sheet like this one belongs to the del Valles' own years, sometime before the 1924 sale.

And the veranda on this label was a postcard star in its own right. Penny postcards of the south veranda at Camulos, roses, century plant and all, were sold for years — one from the Pacific Novelty Co. of San Francisco, captioned "Home of Ramona, Camulos Rancho, California," looks like it was painted from the very spot this label was — and collectors have catalogued well over a dozen different Camulos views on cards from 1898 to about 1915: the courtyard, the chapel, the olive mill, sheep shearing, even "Ramona's Bedroom."

🖨️ An Early Printing

COPYRIGHTED 1900 dates the design; the Schmidt Litho Co. imprint dates the printing itself to 1907 or later. That's the year Max Schmidt's San Francisco firm, rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake and fire, dropped its old Mutual name and became Schmidt Lithograph Company. The printing most likely still falls within the del Valle years, before 1924, and the label trade puts this sheet around 1915 - a 1910s label. The Huntington Library in San Marino keeps this very label in its citrus label collection - the same veranda, the same U. F. del Valle copyright line, the same 10 by 11 inches - so you'd be hanging one alongside the Huntington. The reverse is plain, unprinted stock, with only the front design showing faintly through.

🏛️ Camulos Today

The del Valles sold Camulos in August 1924 to August Rubel of Zurich. The 1994 earthquake did the old adobe real damage, it went on the National Register in 1996, and it's been a National Historic Landmark since 2000 — the same adobe and veranda printed on this label is a real place you can still go stand in front of.