Antique 1920s Fido Brand Citrus Crate Label 🍊 Orosi Tulare County California

🐕 Fido, the Worried Puppy Who Never Rode a Lemon Crate

Cutest dog ever on a crate label, and he never did the job he was printed for. This 1930s Fido Brand citrus crate label was made to be pasted on the end of a wooden lemon box in Tulare County, California, shipped east and thrown out with the crate. Instead it stayed at the packing house with a few thousand others until the label trade found them decades later. Printed for the Orosi Foothill Citrus Association by the Schmidt Lithograph Company of San Francisco, it has never been used, and the colors are as loud as the day it came off the press.

What Is Printed on It

The label measures 12.25 x 8.75 inches and is printed on paper with a black ground inside a deep blue border and a thin red rule. A white puppy with a dark patch over one eye and ear sits on the left, with big worried eyes, a pink muzzle and front paws he has not grown into yet. To his right is Fido in fat yellow-green letters outlined in red, Brand in blue, and then, in orange-red capitals:

OROSI
FOOTHILL
CITRUS
ASSOCIATION
OROSI, TULARE CO. CALIFORNIA.
SHIPPED THRU
LINDSAY-MERRYMAN CITRUS EXC.

Along the bottom left edge, in type small enough to miss, is the printer's imprint: SCHMIDT LITHO. CO. S.F. The back is blank cream paper with the puppy showing faintly through from the front. There is no glue on it; it was never pasted to a box.

A Lemon Label

Fido went on lemons. Label dealers who handled the Fido stock list it as a lemon crate label, printed in the 1930s, at 8.75 x 12.25 inches, the same size as this one. A Fido Brand label from the Orosi Foothill Citrus Association is also held in the citrus label collection at the University of California, Riverside.

The Legend of the Packing House Find

Almost every crate label did exactly what it was made for and went out with the box. By the 1950s the pre-printed cardboard carton had replaced the wooden crate and its paper label, and the packing houses stopped ordering them. Fido took a different road. The story goes, in the label trade, that a few thousand Fido labels turned up still sitting at the packing house, printed and never used, and that find is the reason an unused Fido can be framed on a wall today instead of rotting on a dump.

Orosi: The Town Named for Gold

Orosi sits in northern Tulare County, in the citrus country that runs along the Sierra Nevada foothills from Lindsay north to Orange Cove. Daniel R. Shafer founded the town in 1888. The name comes from oro, Spanish for gold, for the golden California poppies that covered the fields around it, and a post office followed in 1892. Citrus, grapes and olives became its living. It is still farm country; the 2020 census counted 8,329 people, and the Orosi Branch Library is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Lindsay and the Exchange on the Label

The label says the fruit was shipped through the Lindsay-Merryman Citrus Exchange, which takes its name from Lindsay, south of Orosi along the same foothills. Captain Arthur J. Hutchinson arrived there in 1889, bought 2,000 acres and formed the Lindsay Land Company, naming the town for his wife, Sadie Lindsay Patton Hutchinson. The Southern Pacific Railroad came through the same year. A homesteader named Julius Orton is credited with planting the first orange trees in the Lindsay district. By 1905 about 700 acres were in oranges, packing houses went up to handle the fruit, and Lindsay incorporated on February 28, 1910. Six years later the Lindsay Olive company started up, and it grew into the largest olive processor in the world.

How a Crate of California Citrus Got to Market

California citrus growers did not ship on their own. A grower belonged to a local packing association, which packed and labeled the fruit under its own brands, and the associations belonged to district exchanges that marketed it. That ladder of local associations, district exchanges and a central exchange is the structure the California Fruit Growers Exchange was built on. It began in 1893 as the Southern California Fruit Exchange, took the California Fruit Growers Exchange name in 1905 when it had 5,000 members and 45 percent of the industry, and adopted the name Sunkist in 1908. The Fido label puts two rungs of that ladder on one sheet of paper: the Orosi Foothill Citrus Association packed the lemons, and the Lindsay-Merryman Citrus Exchange shipped them.

Schmidt Litho. Co., San Francisco

The little imprint in the corner belongs to one of the biggest label printers in the West. Max Schmidt was born in Germany in 1850, left home at fourteen to work as a cabin boy for six years, and arrived in San Francisco in 1871 speaking little English. He was making pictorial newspaper cuts on zinc plates by 1874, founded M. Schmidt & Company in 1876 to print stock certificates and colored labels, and incorporated as the Schmidt Label & Lithographic Company in 1883. Fires hit the plant in 1884 and 1886. In 1899 the firm combined with competitors as the Mutual Label & Lithographic Company, and the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed its building at Second and Bryant Streets. Schmidt had the money to rebuild on the same corner, and when the new plant opened the business became the Schmidt Lithograph Company, the name on this label.

San Francisco still has the building. A 180-foot clock tower went up in 1920 and 1921, and the old plant at 461 Second Street is now the Clocktower Lofts. Two pieces of lore about Max Schmidt come with it: his will called for a thermometer on the outside of the tower, which the board refused and later put up anyway, and when the Bay Bridge was being planned he threatened to move the plant, so the viaduct was routed around his property. Schmidt died in 1936. In 1966 Stecher-Traung bought the company to form Stecher-Traung-Schmidt, which ran until 1994.

The Legacy of a Throwaway Label

California's citrus crop grew tenfold between 1887 and 1901, and for the better part of a century each wooden box of it carried a paper label meant to catch a buyer's eye in a produce market thousands of miles away. When the cardboard carton took over, the labels stopped, and the ones that were left became a collecting field of their own. The dog on this one has outlasted the crates, the packing house and the exchange named on him.

Questions People Ask

Is the Fido Brand label for oranges or lemons?

Lemons.

How old is the Fido crate label?

It was printed in the 1930s.

Was it ever used on a crate?

No. The back is clean, with no paste. It is new old stock.

What size is it?

Twelve and a quarter inches wide by eight and three quarters tall.

Who printed it?

Max Schmidt's San Francisco firm. Look for SCHMIDT LITHO. CO. S.F. in the lower left corner.

What does "Shipped thru Lindsay-Merryman Citrus Exc." mean?

Fido's packer in Orosi sent its fruit to market by way of the exchange named for Lindsay.

Where is Orosi, California?

Northern Tulare County, on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley where the valley floor meets the Sierra foothills.