Vintage 1940s Channel Lemons Crate Label 🍋 Goleta California Citrus Art NOS

Lemons by the Channel? 🍋 Vintage 1940s Channel Lemons Crate Label, Goleta California, NOS

Size: 12 1/4" x 8 3/4"

🍋 Vintage 1940s Channel Lemons Crate Label – Santa Barbara County, California

Gulls wheel across a deep blue sky around a gold-framed view looking down over the lemon groves to the ocean - a lighthouse and a little red-roofed cottage on the bluff, a two-masted schooner sailing by, and the Channel Islands out on the horizon. That's the Santa Barbara Channel, and this is the Channel brand of the Goleta Lemon Association, lithographed by Schmidt Litho Co. of Los Angeles. New Old Stock, unused and unmounted, never pasted on a crate.

📋 What's printed on it

• CHANNEL / BRAND
• Santa Barbara County
• LEMONS
• GOLETA LEMON ASSOCIATION / GOLETA CALIFORNIA
• CALIFORNIA / Red Ball, in red script on a cream panel over a red disc, the California Fruit Growers Exchange's companion mark to Sunkist
• SCHMIDT LITHO. CO. L.A., in fine type along the bottom-left edge

🌊 The Santa Barbara Channel

The channel is the stretch of Pacific between the mainland and the Channel Islands, and those are the islands you're looking at on the horizon. The Chumash people crossed it for thousands of years in their plank canoes, the tomol, trading between the islands and the coast. Later it was schooner country, the ships that anchored off Goleta's slough to trade goods for hides.

The lighthouse on the bluff is a nice touch too. Santa Barbara got its first lighthouse on the Mesa in 1856, and Julia Williams kept it for forty years, from 1865 to 1905, until a broken hip ended her keeping days. The old tower came down in the earthquake of June 29, 1925.

⛵ Goleta, the schooner town

Goleta is Spanish for schooner. In 1819 José de la Guerra's schooner ran aground in the Goleta Slough and Benjamin Foxen repaired it on the mud flats; in 1828 and 1829 William Dana had Foxen build a ship there, remembered as the first American ship built in California. Daniel Hill later bought it and renamed it La Goleta, and his 1846 land grant, approved by Governor Pío Pico, carried the name to the town.

🍋 The Goleta Lemon Association

Goleta has been lemon country ever since Sherman Patterson Stow set out some 3,000 lemon trees on Rancho La Patera around 1875 - California's first known commercial lemon orchard. Sixty growers with around 600 acres formed the Goleta Lemon Association in 1935; they opened their packing house on La Patera Lane by the Southern Pacific tracks in 1936, rebuilt after fire took that first plant in January 1950 - the new one was said to be the largest single-unit lemon packing plant in the world - and kept it going until 1978. The brand told the buyer the grade - Goleta and San Marcos were the top, La Patera extra choice, Channel, Schooner and Arboleda choice, and Estero standard. Santa Barbara County lemon acreage peaked at 9,328 acres in 1957, and strawberries have taken most of that ground since.

Crate labels were made to ride on a wooden box across the country by rail or truck and then get thrown out. Not all of them were, though. The Santa Barbara Historical Museum has a little group of six Goleta Lemon Association labels - a Channel just like this one, a Schooner, a Goleta, two San Marcos and an Arboleda - and the story that came with them is that the Goleta Valley Historical Society got them out of the old lemon packing house itself. Collectors go after Santa Barbara County labels in particular, and these days they count as folk art as much as advertising. This Channel Lemons label stands as a preserved artifact from a time when California citrus branding was bold, narrative‑driven, and visually ambitious. 🍊

📐 Details

Era: 1940s
Producer: Goleta Lemon Association, Goleta, CA
Lithographer: Schmidt Litho Co, Los Angeles
Region: Santa Barbara County, California
Size: 12 1/4" × 8 3/4"
Condition: New Old Stock (unused, unmounted)
Material: Lithographed paper crate label