Vintage 1940s Pilgrim Crate Label 🦃 – Mayflower Fruit Association, Exeter, California

Pilgrims and Fruit? 🍇 Vintage 1940s Crate Label, Mayflower Fruit Association, Exeter, California

Size: 12 3/4" x 3 3/4" ~ little to slight wear on bottom right corner mostly (see pictures), never would notice on display, but please judge for yourself.

📖 A stern-faced Pilgrim in a tall black hat and a wide white collar, holding his book in both hands, and the joke right there in the fine print: the Pilgrim brand from the Mayflower Fruit Association. It's an unused crate label from Exeter, California, and I love the straight face on this fellow.

🔍 What's On It

Pilgrim in big script with Brand, then GROWN AND PACKED BY MAYFLOWER FRUIT ASS'N., EXETER, CALIFORNIA, and down in the bottom left corner in tiny pale blue type, REG.U.S.PAT.OFFICE, spelled out in full. There's no printer's name anywhere on it, and the back is blank.

⛵ Mayflower, Puritan and Pilgrim

The Mayflower Fruit Association started in 1924, when 21 grape growers around Exeter built a packing house on the Southern Pacific right of way, just north of the Hunt Brothers cannery, and sold their grapes through the California Fruit Exchange. The plan, as the Visalia paper reported that September, was to pack the top grade as Mayflower, with a picture of the ship on the label, and the second grade as Puritan, with a Puritan maiden. Pilgrim came along a couple of years later.

That REG line on the label is real. The association registered PILGRIM as a federal trademark on August 30, 1927, saying it had been in use since September 1, 1926, for apples, peaches, plums, pomegranates, grapes, figs, oranges, lemons and grapefruit. The application was signed by the secretary, Ernest G. Dudley, who the local paper said had been a professor of forestry at Syracuse before he came to Exeter. The president was Clarence A. Dorsey, and Josh Benadom managed the place from the mid-1930s into 1962. The association republished the mark in 1952, which meant swearing it was still in use, and renewed it in 1967.

It was a grape and tree fruit house all along. In 1937 the Exeter houses were packing Thompson, Ribier and Red Malaga grapes, and in September 1946 Mayflower packed the first Emperor grapes for export. In 1953 the USDA ran test shipments of plums in new kinds of containers out of Mayflower. By 1992 it had 45 members, and in 1996, as a 72-year-old co-op packing plums, grapes, kiwis, nectarines, peaches and persimmons, it merged with the Tulare County Lemon Association as Mayflower-TCLA.

🏡 Exeter, California

Exeter is a Tulare County town on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley. The railroad came through by 1888, and the Southern Pacific's D. W. Parkhurst, who bought the land from early settler John Firebaugh, named it after his own hometown, Exeter, England. It incorporated in 1911, and today it's known for the history murals all over downtown.

And a little Pilgrim lore for you: that buckle on his hat is a 19th-century touch. Historians say the real 1620 Pilgrims didn't wear buckled hats at all; the buckles came along in the 1800s, when artists started picturing them. So this is the storybook Pilgrim, which is exactly what you want on a fruit box.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1940s Pilgrim Brand crate label, Mayflower Fruit Ass'n., Exeter, California
• Pilgrim with tall hat, collar and book; REG.U.S.PAT.OFFICE
• About 12 3/4" x 3 3/4", unused, New Old Stock
• You'll get one label like the ones shown

🖼️ It's perfect for a Thanksgiving table, a farmhouse kitchen, or anybody from Exeter or the Tulare County fruit country.