Vintage 1940s Yakima Valley Fruit Crate Label 🍎 — Grown and Packed By Herman Fluegge, Route 4 Yakima WA

Who Grew Yakima Valley Fruit for Herman Fluegge? 🍎 Yakima Valley Fruit, Grown and Packed by Herman Fluegge

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

No fancy brand name on this one. Just a man's name, set big and proud: HERMAN FLUEGGE. This is a vintage 1940s Yakima Valley Fruit crate label, "Grown and Packed By" Herman Fluegge of Route 4, Yakima, Washington, never pasted on a box. He grew the apples, he packed them, and he put his own name on the box. I love a label like that.

🔍 What's on it

YAKIMA VALLEY FRUIT across the top, Grown and Packed By, then HERMAN FLUEGGE in tall stencil-style letters, and Route 4, Yakima, Washington. In the middle, a painted panorama of the valley: rows of orchard trees running down to the river, a long packing shed among the rows, hills and snow-capped mountains under a cloudy sky. On the right, three big apples on a leafy branch break right out of the frame. At the bottom, Net Weight Not Less Than 40 lbs. When Packed. The back is plain, with the lettering showing faintly through.

There's no brand word, no "trade mark," nothing but the grower's name. And Route 4 is a rural route address: he was out on his own place, not in town.

🌄 How the Yakima Valley got its apples

The Northern Pacific Railroad reached the Yakima Valley in 1885, and that gave growers a dependable way to get fruit to market. In 1887 Henry Pinchwell planted what was probably the first commercial orchard in the valley, five acres of prunes and peaches. But it was dry sagebrush country, and it took water to change that.

On March 26, 1892, water ran into the Sunnyside Canal for the first time. It was built by Walter N. Granger's company with the Northern Pacific behind it, and it opened 25 miles of the valley to farming, later stretched to 60. One of the speakers at the opening said the water "shall find its way into the heart of the desert," and it did. Sagebrush turned into orchards and hop yards, and the valley's volcanic-ash soil, with warm sunny days and cool nights, grew big, well-colored apples. By 1900, 200 boxcar-loads of fruit a year were leaving the Yakima Valley.

Today more than 60 percent of the nation's apples come from Washington, and the Yakima Valley is one of the biggest apple regions in the state. Labels like this one, from growers like Herman Fluegge, are how it looked when the fruit still went out in wooden boxes.

Herman Fluegge's labels made it into the archives, too. Washington State University's special collections keep a Herman Fluegge label from Yakima dated to about 1947, and a later Herman Fluegge & Sons label from about 1954, so the orchard became a family business.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! Those red apples and that valley view look great framed in a kitchen, and it's a perfect gift for anybody from Yakima or the Washington apple country, or anybody named Fluegge.

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.