Antique 1930s Seald-PeP Biplane Crate Label ✈️ — Waverly Citrus Growers Assn., Waverly Polk Co. Florida

Who Packed Seald-PeP Citrus in Waverly? ✈️ Seald-PeP Biplane Strip Label, Waverly Citrus Growers Ass'n., Waverly, Polk Co., Florida

Size: 9" x 3" ~ Little to no wear.

An open-cockpit biplane barnstorming across a deep blue sky in a pale glow, with a big orange Seald-PeP in shadowed letters beside it. This is an antique 1930s Seald-PeP strip label from the Waverly Citrus Growers Association of Waverly, Polk County, Florida, and it was never pasted on a box. The biplane's aviation miracle on a beautiful piece of Americana!

🔍 What's on it

A long narrow strip: at the left, a single-engine biplane with its upper and lower wings braced with struts, a fixed wheel and a spinning propeller, with a little yellow band on the tail. At the right, Seald- over PeP in orange display letters with a hard black shadow, on deep blue. Across the bottom in pale blue, WAVERLY CITRUS GROWERS ASSN.; WAVERLY POLK CO. FLA. That's all the printing there is, no printer named. The back is plain.

🍊 The old Waverly name

That name on the bottom line is what makes this strip older than the square Seald-PeP label. The Waverly growers organized in 1914, led by Charles Hillery Walker and a Danish immigrant, W.L. Pedersen, and for their first twenty-some years they were the Waverly Citrus Growers' Association. In 1936 they changed the name to the Waverly Growers Cooperative, and the later Seald-PeP labels carry that new name. So this biplane strip, with the old name, comes from the years before 1936.

In its day the Waverly packing house could pack 6,000 standard boxes of fruit in an eight-hour day, and the cooperative even had a visitor center, the Waverly Welcome House, billed as "The Show Window of Waverly Growers," with a formal garden and picnic grounds for the tourists. Waverly is still in the citrus business today as a member of Florida's Natural.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this antique advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That long biplane strip looks great framed over a doorway, a desk or a window, and it's a perfect gift for a pilot, an aviation buff, or anybody from Waverly, Lake Wales or Polk County, 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.