Vintage 1940s Seald-PeP Biplane Crate Label ✈️ — Waverly Growers Cooperative, Waverly FL — Brandau-Craig-Dickerson Litho, Nashville

Who Packed Seald-PeP Citrus in Waverly? ✈️ Seald-PeP Brand, Waverly Growers Cooperative, Waverly, Florida

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

An open-cockpit biplane barnstorming across a deep blue sky, glowing in a pale green halo, over a big bold Seald-PeP in orange with a purple shadow. This is a vintage 1940s Seald-PeP crate label from the Waverly Growers Cooperative of Waverly, Florida, printed by the Brandau-Craig-Dickerson Co. of Nashville, and never pasted on a box. I love this one, it's the biplane's aviation miracle on a beautiful piece of Americana!

🔍 What's on it

Up in the top corner, an orange-and-brown biplane with its upper and lower wings braced with struts, a big round wheel hanging down and the propeller spinning, with a pilot up in the open cockpit. Below it, Seald-PeP in huge orange letters with a deep purple shadow on an airbrushed blue ground. Along the bottom, WAVERLY GROWERS COOPERATIVE and WAVERLY, FLORIDA in pale blue, and in tiny type at the lower right, the printer: BRANDAU-CRAIG-DICKERSON CO. NASHVILLE with LITHO. IN U.S.A. The sheet is square with its four corners clipped off. The back is plain.

🍊 The Waverly Growers

Waverly is a little citrus town in Polk County, in the middle of Florida's orange country, and its growers organized early. The cooperative was founded in 1914 by a group of local growers led by Charles Hillery Walker and a Danish immigrant, W.L. Pedersen. It started out as the Waverly Citrus Growers' Association and changed its name to the Waverly Growers Cooperative in 1936, which is the name printed on this label. That tells you something neat: the same Seald-PeP biplane also turns up on a narrow strip label under the old Waverly Citrus Growers Ass'n name, so the brand was flying before this version was printed.

In its day the Waverly packing house could prepare and pack 6,000 standard boxes of fruit in an eight-hour working day, for groves covering some 7,000 acres and more than two million boxes a year, and about 465 people worked there, sixteen of them for more than 25 years. Waverly even had a place for the tourists, the Waverly Welcome House, billed as "The Show Window of Waverly Growers," with a formal garden and picnic grounds where visitors could learn how citrus got from the grove to the box. The cooperative is still in the business today as a member of Florida's Natural.

🖨️ Brandau-Craig-Dickerson, Nashville

Brandau-Craig-Dickerson Co. of Nashville was one of the major printers of Florida citrus labels, a long way from Florida, and the old Brandau-Craig-Dickerson Building on 10th Avenue South in Nashville was still standing in 2010.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That biplane looks great framed in a den, an office or a kid's room, and it's a perfect gift for a pilot, an aviation buff, or anybody from Waverly or Polk County, Florida.

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.