Vintage 1940s Wise Bird Brand Crate Label 🦉 — West Orange Citrus Growers Association, Winter Garden Florida, Moonlit Owl

Who Packed Wise Bird Citrus? 🦉 Wise Bird Brand, West Orange Citrus Growers Association

Size: 9" x 9" ~ Little to no wear.

A big great horned owl sitting on a bare branch in front of a full yellow moon. That's about as good as a crate label gets! This is a vintage 1940s Wise Bird Brand citrus crate label from the West Orange Citrus Growers Association of Winter Garden, Florida, never pasted on a crate. You'll see this owl on reproduction prints and tin signs; this is the real printed label.

🔍 What's on it

WISE BIRD across the top, with a little BRAND tucked under it. Below, the owl: ear tufts up, eyes wide open, perched on a forked branch against a huge moon, with a row of pines behind him and the night all around. Down in the corner, WEST ORANGE CITRUS GROWERS ASSOCIATION and WINTER GARDEN, FLORIDA, and along the bottom in tiny type is the printer, LOUIS ROESCH CO., LITHO., S. F., CALIF. The back is plain, with the owl and the lettering showing faintly through.

West Orange is the west end of Orange County, the country around Winter Garden, so the "Orange" in the name is the place. What went in the box was the citrus.

🍊 Winter Garden

Settlers started coming to the Winter Garden area in the 1850s, drawn by the rich muck land along the shore of Lake Apopka. The Roper, Reams, Dunaway, Speer and Starke families were among the first. The Orange Belt Railroad came through, and citrus, turpentine and lumber built the town. It was established in 1903, with A.B. Newton as its first mayor, and incorporated as a city in 1908. The Great Freeze of 1894–95 had hit the groves hard, but citrus came back, and the town grew past 1,000 people by 1920. Old-timers like to say that Winter Garden once shipped more vegetables and citrus than any other town in the USA.

The growers there worked together. A citrus growers association was a cooperative: farmers banded together to share the cost of caring for and harvesting the groves, owning the equipment, and packing, marketing and shipping the fruit. The Winter Garden packinghouses sat along the Tavares & Gulf railroad tracks, and a label like this one went on the end of every wooden crate that left the packing line.

Lake Apopka had its fame too. It was called "the large-mouth bass capital," and the Edgewater Hotel opened downtown in 1927 for the fishermen. By the late 1960s the lake was badly polluted and the highways pulled business away from downtown. Downtown Winter Garden came back, though. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, and the West Orange Trail brings people through it today.

🖨️ Printed in San Francisco

Here's something I love about this label: it's a Florida orange label printed clear across the country. Most Florida labels were printed at the Florida Grower Press in Tampa, but this one carries the imprint of the Louis Roesch Company of San Francisco. Louis Roesch was born in Stuttgart in 1856, came to America in 1872, and founded his lithography firm in San Francisco in 1879. It specialized in labels and posters for California's farms and wineries. After the 1906 earthquake and fire, Roesch rebuilt on Mission Street. His son, Louis Roesch Jr., ran the business until his death in 1959, and the old Roesch building stood until 2011.

If you collect Florida citrus labels, you're in good company. The big collection is Jerry Chicone Jr.'s, and it's at the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries.

The Lakeland Public Library keeps a Wise Bird label from the West Orange Citrus Growers Association in its Florida citrus label collection. And from 1937 on, the new Florida Citrus Commission required every citrus label to be registered.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That owl and moon look great framed square in a kitchen, a den or a cabin, and it's a perfect gift for a bird lover or anybody from Central Florida.

Crate labels are a reminder of a bygone era, and the lithography on them 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 them out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.