Vintage 1950s Land O' Lakes Can Label 🧈 Rare, Baltimore MD, RIP Icon Mia!

Remember Land O'Lakes Blackberries? 🫐 Land O'Lakes Fancy Cultivated Blackberries Can Label, © 1951

Size: 10 1/4" x 4 1/4" ~ Little to no wear.

This is a rare vintage 1950s Land O'Lakes can label, distributed out of Baltimore, MD, for the Oconomowoc Canning Company of Wisconsin. It's one long wrap-around label printed twice across, with Land o'Lakes in big red script, a little Native American maiden paddling a red canoe across the blue water beside it, a black oval with BLACKBERRIES in bold yellow letters, and a blue bowl heaped with glossy dark berries. My pictures don't capture the label's full glory, as the colors are best seen in person.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• Land O'Lakes, REG. U. S. PAT. OFF.
• IN EXTRA HEAVY SYRUP, FANCY CULTIVATED BLACKBERRIES, IN HEAVY SYRUP
• TRADE MARK REGISTERED, U. S. PATENT OFFICE, OCONOMOWOC CANNING COMPANY, OCONOMOWOC, WISCONSIN
• OCONO CO DISTRIBUTORS, BALTIMORE, MD.
• © 1951
• Size of can No. 303, Contents 1 Pound, Cups Approx. 2, Servings 4
• Insist on LAND O'LAKES for Quality Foods. "You'll Taste the Difference"

Fun little detail: the net weight at the bottom was overprinted to read 1 POUND 1 OUNCE, while the panel above still says 1 Pound.

🛶 The Other Land O'Lakes

Here's something most folks don't know. The Oconomowoc Canning Company was incorporated in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin in 1920 by the Binzel brothers, brewers looking for something to do during Prohibition, and it put the Land O'Lakes name on its canned peas that very year, expanding to its other vegetables in 1928. Its trademark was registered on September 9, 1924. The Minnesota dairy co-op that made Land O'Lakes famous for butter was founded on July 8, 1921 and picked the name in a 1924 contest, and the two companies ended up in court. In 1963 a federal court in Wisconsin ruled for the canner, a landmark case in trademark law, because its man Howard E. Jones had personally tested and graded the canned vegetables sold under the name. Oconomowoc went on to buy the Stokely Finest label from Quaker Oats in 1984, became the third largest vegetable canner in the country, and in 1997 Chiquita bought the company, by then Stokely USA.

👩 Mia, the Butter Maiden

The maiden everybody remembers is the dairy co-op's. Mia came to be in 1928, when illustrator Arthur C. Hanson painted a Native American woman in a buckskin dress with a blue lake and green pines behind her for the butter packages. Decades later the Red Lake Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait redrew her, and in February 2020, after 92 years, the co-op took her off the package. The canner's label here has its own little maiden, out on the lake in her canoe.

🏡 Display

It's a great piece for a kitchen, a Wisconsin or Minnesota cabin, or anybody who grew up with Land O'Lakes in the fridge.