Vintage 1940s Falls Brand Apples Crate Label 🍎 — Chelan Falls Orchards, Chelan Falls WA — Crocker Imprint, WWII Eagle Device

Who Packed Falls Brand Apples? 🍎 FALLS Brand Apples, Chelan Falls Orchards, Chelan Falls, Washington

Size: 10" x 8 3/4" ~ Little to no wear.

A huge wall of white water thunders down the left side of this label into a cloud of mist, painted against a black sky, and FALLS stands off to the right in tall yellow and orange letters. Down below sits the part I love most, a blue eagle swooping over a red disc of white stars and red and white stripes, with a warplane and a warship tucked in underneath it and U.S.A above. It's a patriotic tribute to the forces fighting overseas, right there on a box of Washington apples.

🏷️ Every Word on the Label

• FALLS, BRAND
• APPLES
• ONE BUSHEL BY VOLUME
• CHELAN FALLS ORCHARDS, CHELAN FALLS, WASH.
• U.S.A
• CROCKER, the printer's name in tiny type on the green strip at the bottom right

The back is blank, with FALLS, APPLES, the eagle and the waterfall showing through faintly in reverse.

®️ A Brand Since 1920

The FALLS name was registered as a trademark for fresh apples by Geo. D. Brown & Son, Inc., doing business as Chelan Falls Orchards. They filed on July 4, 1947, it was registered on December 14, 1948, and in their application they claimed use of the brand since 1920. The drawing they registered is this very layout, the waterfall pouring down the left side with FALLS lettered beside it. They renewed it in 1968, and it finally lapsed in 1992. The orchard's sister brand, CLIFF, was filed the same day and claimed use since 1943.

The dealers who handle this design date it to the 1940s and call that eagle a war emblem, which is where I date mine too. With a warplane, a warship and a stars-and-stripes eagle on it, it's hard to read it any other way.

🌄 Grow Red Apples on Irrigated Washington Land

Chelan Falls Orchards goes back a long way. In December 1911 Chelan Falls Orchards was advertised in the Pacific Monthly under the headline "Grow Red Apples on Irrigated Washington Land," selling orchard tracts on the Columbia River just north of the Wenatchee Valley. The ad promised perfect air drainage through the Columbia River gorge, heavy winter snow to hold back the buds until frost danger was past, and cool nights with almost continuous sunshine to give the fruit high color. The tract ran 600 acres, it was reached by steamboat on the Columbia and sat on the line the Great Northern was building north from Wenatchee to Oroville, and a gravity irrigation system was due to replace the pumping plant early in 1912. The ad even boasted that a mile back of town, 100,000 horsepower was to be developed on the Chelan River, with the sixty-mile Lake Chelan as its natural reservoir.

The Great Northern spur did reach Chelan Falls in 1914, letting the big Beebe Orchards nearby sell into a much larger market, and the Wenatchee-Beebe Orchard Company got the consent of Congress in 1919 to build a bridge, and when it opened in October 1920 it was the first large suspension bridge built in Washington, carrying irrigation water across in two 12-inch flumes.

🍎 750 Boxes of Bright Red

Here's a great little piece of orchard history. In a letter dated January 25, 1932, printed in a nursery catalog, the Chelan Falls Orchards' orchard manager, N. T. Cooper, wrote that in 1927 they had topgrafted a block of Black Ben trees over to Richared Delicious on the Chelan Falls orchard tract, and in 1931 they harvested about 750 boxes of apples from those trees. They were practically 100 percent bright red, he wrote, and packed out a much greater share of Extra Fancy and Fancy grades than the common Delicious. Richared was the bright red strain of Delicious that the Columbia and Okanogan Nursery introduced in 1926, and it was exactly the kind of red apple the old ad had promised this ground would grow.

💧 The Falls of the Chelan River

The Chelan River is only about four miles long. It runs from Lake Chelan down through a steep, rocky gorge, dropping 401 feet on its way to meet the Columbia near the little community of Chelan Falls. Before the power and irrigation projects came, it was a river of considerable volume. Then Lake Chelan Dam was finished in 1927, and today the riverbed is mostly dry, little more than a spillway, with the power plant sitting down by its old mouth. The town itself sits in a prosperous fruit-growing area on the Columbia, with orchards crowding the space between the road and the river. The brand is FALLS and the town is Chelan Falls, and I like to think that roaring waterfall on the label remembers what that river looked like in its day.

🖨️ The Crocker Imprint

CROCKER is H. S. Crocker Co., founded in Sacramento, California back in 1856. It bought Union Lithograph in 1922 and printed labels under the Crocker-Union name from 1936 to about 1946, and plain CROCKER, like on this one, is the company's own name.

🖼️ Display

Crate Labels are a reminder of a bygone era but the amazing lithography process 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 these out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries then they will be very difficult to acquire.

Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum!