Vintage 1940s River Lad Brand California Fresh Asparagus Crate Label 🌱 — Blue Goose, American National Foods, Los Angeles

Who Packed River Lad Asparagus? 🌱 RIVER LAD Brand California Fresh Asparagus, Blue Goose Quality

Size: 9 1/4" x 9" ~ Little to no wear.

Here's a vintage 1940s River Lad asparagus label, sent out under the Blue Goose banner by American National Foods, Inc. of Los Angeles, and the River Lad himself is one of my favorite faces in the whole asparagus pile. He's a Dutch boy in wooden shoes, hands jammed in his pockets, grinning on a riverbank with a windmill across the water behind him. It's practical and good-looking at the same time, which is exactly what a label had to be to get noticed on a busy produce market floor.

Along with CALIFORNIA FRESH ASPARAGUS and MIN. NET WT. 30 LBS., the label carries the Blue Goose Quality trademark in its little oval, with American National Foods, Inc. lettered around the goose. The printer's line in the corner is Schmidt Litho. Co., S.F., and The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan keeps a River Lad asparagus label from Schmidt in its collection, which it dates to 1940-1950.

🌷 California's Holland

A Dutch boy on a box of California asparagus? It makes more sense than you'd think. Asparagus is one of the big crops of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which started out as a huge freshwater marsh of peat and tule islands and was reclaimed for farming from the mid-1800s on. Chinese laborers did the backbreaking work of building the first levees between the 1850s and the 1870s, and the state set up its Board of Reclamation in 1861 to organize the job island by island. Today about 57 reclaimed islands and tracts sit behind some 1,100 miles of levees, and so much of that ground has sunk below sea level that people took to calling the Delta "California's Holland." So a river lad with a windmill fits right in.

🪿 The Blue Goose

I've always liked the Blue Goose story. The goose started with two cousins, James S. Crutchfield and Robert B. Woolfolk, who founded the Crutchfield-Woolfolk Company in Pittsburgh in 1896 and opened their first packinghouse in Crescent City, Florida in 1903. From Pittsburgh they launched the Blue Goose trademark, one of the earliest tries at putting a brand name on fresh fruit and vegetables for the shopper. In 1919 the company became American Fruit Growers, Inc., with Crutchfield as president until 1939.

American Fruit Growers worked mostly as a seller, not a grower. It would buy the very best fruit a grower or packer had and market it under its own name, or it would let a packer use the goose on that packer's top grade. Citrus wore the goose first, oranges and grapefruit, and then it turned up on apples and on vegetables too: asparagus, cabbage, onions. In 1922 the company counted 165 sales offices between the U.S. and Canada. It changed its name to Blue Goose Growers in 1961 and leaned hard into citrus. On this label the goose wears a different name, American National Foods, Inc.

🖨️ The Printer

Schmidt Lithograph has a story of its own. Max Schmidt was born in Germany in 1850, went to sea as a cabin boy at fourteen, and sailed around the world for six years before landing in San Francisco in 1871. He started his own shop in 1876. The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed his plant, he rebuilt, and from 1907 on the business was the Schmidt Lithograph Company, a name it kept for about six decades, turning out crate labels, can labels, seed packets and stock certificates. In 1966 it merged with Stecher-Traung to become Stecher-Traung-Schmidt.

He's a cheerful one to hang in a kitchen, and a fun gift for anybody with Dutch roots or family from the Delta towns along the Sacramento and San Joaquin.