Vintage 1940s Rancheria Bartlett Pears Crate Label 🍐 Native American Teepee Scene Suisun Valley Blue Anchor California Fruit Exchange

Bartletts From the Valley of Pears 🍐 A Vintage 1940s Rancheria Brand Bartlett Pears Crate Label, Suisun Valley Fruit Growers Association, Suisun, California

Size: 11" x 7 1/2"

The painting shows a camp of teepees, some with smoke curling up, beside a lake under the mountains. Up front a man in a feathered headdress holds a long pole beside a white horse, and a woman with a feather in her headband sits in the foreground with a seated man. Around it: RANCHERIA BRAND, PRODUCE OF U.S.A., SUISUN VALLEY FRUIT GROWERS ASSOCIATION, SUISUN, CALIF., the Blue Anchor seal of the CALIFORNIA FRUIT EXCHANGE, BARTLETT PEARS and NET WEIGHT 46 LBS. These were never pasted on a box.

🍐 Suisun Valley pears

Bartlett pears were Suisun Valley's main crop from the late 1880s until wine grapes started taking over in the early 1970s. After World War I there were fifteen to twenty packing sheds in the valley shipping 45,000 tons of pears a year, and Suisun cherries were famous for being the first to reach the winter-weary cities back East. The Suisun Valley Fruit Growers Association was incorporated on February 11, 1920 - so this label is 1920 or later - and it's still going, a farm co-op with stores in Fairfield and Winters.

William C. Robbins, whose family packed its own fruit there, remembered growing up by the packing stations at Willota Station on the Sacramento Northern Railroad, which sent the fruit out in refrigerated cars to the Bay Area and the rest of the country, and he recalled that a lot of the labels were done by a German lithographer in San Francisco. A dealer's copy of this very Rancheria label carries the imprint Schmidt Litho S.F. - Max Schmidt's company, one of the great West Coast label printers, founded in the 1870s and in business until it merged into Stecher-Traung-Schmidt in 1966.

⚓ The Blue Anchor

The anchor seal belongs to the California Fruit Exchange, the growers' marketing co-op for deciduous fruit. The anchor was first used in 1904 and registered as a trademark in 1923, and the Exchange became Blue Anchor, Inc. in 1969. On a box of pears in an Eastern auction house, that little anchor told the buyer the fruit came through the Exchange and its growers stood behind it.

🏕️ The name

Ranchería is Spanish for a small rural settlement, and in California the word came to mean the small Indian settlements the government set up, most of them between 1906 and 1934 - and it's still the official word today, with many California tribes federally recognized under the name of their rancheria. Fifty-nine of them were created in all, scattered from the north coast down through the Sierra foothills. The town of Suisun itself takes its name from the Suisunes, the Patwin people of the valley, and Solano County is named for their leader Sem-Yeto, baptized Francisco Solano. The label doesn't name any people or place in its picture; it's an artist's scene.

🍐 About these

Every one I have is unused, 11 by 7 1/2 inches. Dealers date this label to the 1940s and '50s, and the Center for Sacramento History, which keeps this same Rancheria in its Henley crate label collection - the couple, the teepees, the 46 lbs. line and all - files theirs under the 1940s. It looks great framed in a kitchen, with other California crate labels, or for anybody with Solano County roots. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Rancheria labels for Suisun Valley pears again, and once these last unused ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.