Vintage 1940s Don Juan Selected California Pears Crate Label 🍐 — Antone A. Freitas & Son, San Juan Bautista CA

Who Packed Don Juan Pears? 🍐 Don Juan Brand Selected California Pears from the Mission Town of San Juan Bautista

Size: 10 1/2" x 7 1/2" ~ Little to no wear.

A red banner slashing across a black label, a golden pear in a spotlight, and a painted valley of orchard rows running off toward pink mountains. This is a vintage 1940s Don Juan crate label for Selected California Pears, from the packing house of Antone A. Freitas & Son in the old mission town of San Juan Bautista, California, and never used. I love the colors on this one, that black ground makes the pear glow!

🔍 What's on it

DON JUAN runs corner to corner across a band, with Selected California PEARS underneath. Up in the corner is a little window onto the valley: orchard rows running away in lines, ranch buildings and mountains with one sharp peak. At the right, PRODUCE OF U. S. A. over a single pear with its leaves, and along the bottom: PACKED BY ANTONE A. FREITAS & SON, SAN JUAN BAUTISTA, CALIF. and MIN. NET WEIGHT 46 LBS. The back is plain, with DON JUAN showing through faintly in reverse.

⛪ Pears at the old mission

Pears have been growing in San Juan Bautista longer than California has been a state. Mission San Juan Bautista was founded in 1797, and in its early years the friars and the Native Californians there were picking fruit from a 40-acre mission pear orchard of 897 trees. That orchard is long gone, though a surviving mission pear tree has been found and grafted from, so a little of it lives on. The town grew up around the mission, and the San Juan Valley around it turned into orchard country: apples, pears, cherries, prunes, apricots and walnuts.

👨‍🌾 The Freitas name in the San Juan Valley

Freitas was one of the big Portuguese fruit names in the San Juan Valley, and more than one Freitas family ran orchards and packing sheds there. One of the best-told stories is Manuel Freitas's. He came over from the Azores, worked in an orchard in Watsonville, and then started his own place in San Juan Bautista around the turn of the last century, growing apples, pears, cherries, prunes and walnuts. His farm grew to 100 acres with four sons pitching in. Twin sons Lawrence and Clarence ran L and C Freitas, with Lawrence on the packing and shipping and Clarence out in the fields. In its heyday they packed and shipped fruit for seventeen growers around the valley and sent top-notch pears as far as London, England. History San José even keeps one of their Freitas Brand pear crates.

Another Freitas family started with M.D.A. Freitas, who came from Portugal to Hollister as a boy of fifteen in the late 1800s and later bought a ranch of his own. His son Manuel Jr. moved it from dry-farming into orchards and shipped fancy pears all the way to Liverpool. By 2003 his grandson Anthony had pulled out the pear trees, and said the whole valley used to be nothing but orchards. That's the story of a lot of these labels: the orchards gave way, and the paper is what's left.

When the family's farm turned 100 in 2002, Lawrence's widow Alice Freitas, then 75, still kept a few acres of Fuji apples going and said of the valley, "The ground is fantastic." She even shared her homemade applesauce: apples with a couple of pears thrown in, simmered and left chunky, with cinnamon and nutmeg once it cools. Sounds so yummy!

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! It looks great framed in a kitchen or a dining room, and it's a perfect gift for a gardener, anyone with Portuguese or Azorean roots, or anybody who has ever stood in the old mission at San Juan Bautista.

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.