Vintage 1940s Skookum Brand Apples Crate Label 🍎 — Skookum Packers Association, Wenatchee WA — Lake Chelan Brand Inset

Who Packed Skookum Apples? 🍎 Skookum: The Northwest's Word for "Strong," and the Apple Brand That Hung Over Wenatchee for a Century

Size: 11" x 9"

In the Chinook Jargon, the old trade language of the Pacific Northwest, skookum meant able, strong, big, genuine, reliable. It was the right word for an apple brand, and one of the best known in Washington took it. In 1921 a big Skookum sign went up on the roof of the old Wenatchee Hotel. The sign lasted 101 years, until it was taken down in June 2022.

This is a vintage Skookum Apples crate label from Wenatchee, Washington's Skookum Packers Association: a red apple and a yellow apple behind the big green word Skookum, Apples in blue script, and a smiling cartoon face with braids and a single feather. At the lower left, printed as a small framed picture, sits a second brand: LAKE CHELAN BRAND, an angler in a boat on a mountain lake. It is an unused label, never pasted to a crate, with a plain back.

🏷️ What Is Printed on This Label

• ONE BUSHEL
• EXTRA FANCY
• Skookum
• REG. U. S. A. PAT. OFFICE
• Apples
• LAKE CHELAN / BRAND
• GROWN AND PACKED BY / LAKE CHELAN GROWERS UNION / CHELAN, WASHINGTON, U.S.A
• INSPECTED AND CERTIFIED / BY THE SKOOKUM PACKERS ASSOCIATION
• Skookum Packers Association / Wenatchee, Washington, U.S.A.
• UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• COPYRIGHT S.P.A. 1916 / U. S. A. PATENT OFFICE
• DISTRIBUTED BY / NORTHWESTERN FRUIT EXCHANGE / WENATCHEE, WASHINGTON, U.S.A.

Three organisations share one sheet. The Lake Chelan Growers Union of Chelan grew and packed the fruit. The Skookum Packers Association of Wenatchee inspected and certified it, and its name runs across the label in large letters. The Northwestern Fruit Exchange of Wenatchee distributed it. The only year on the label is the copyright line, S.P.A. 1916, a copyright year printed into the design. It is not the date this sheet came off the press.

🗣️ The Word

Chinook Jargon grew up as a pidgin for trade in the Pacific Northwest, built from Chinookan, Salishan and Wakashan languages along with English and French. It was at its height from about 1858 to 1900 and was still spoken into the middle of the twentieth century. Skookum was one of its most useful words. As a verb helper it meant "to be able." As an adjective it meant able, strong, big, genuine or reliable, and a history museum in Hood River, Oregon, gives it as "strong" or "greatest." People in the Northwest still use it as a word of approval.

🍏 The Northwestern Fruit Exchange and the Skookum Brand

Good Fruit Grower traces the Skookum story to July 29, 1910, when the Northwestern Fruit Exchange was established in Portland, Oregon. J. S. Crutchfield of Pittsburgh saw what a Pacific Northwest fruit-buying and marketing cooperative could be, and W. F. Gwin ran it as manager. Skookum became its brand, and it traveled well beyond Wenatchee. The History Museum of Hood River County shows a label for Spitzenburg apples from the C. A. Macrum orchard in Mosier, Oregon, shipped under the Skookum Brand by the Exchange.

The brand had pull. In January 1918, with American soldiers in France, a Skookum apples advertisement in the Ladies' Home Journal urged people to send boxes of apples to the troops. And as the Chicago Packer reported in 1922, George Crane, president of the Brewster Orchards Company, signed a contract to sell his apples under the Skookum brand through the Exchange in Wenatchee.

The label's other big name, the Skookum Packers Association, is printed here as the certifying body. INSPECTED AND CERTIFIED is the job the inset gives it: growers packed, and the association put its name to the fruit.

🎣 The Lake Chelan Inset: A Brand Inside a Brand

The little framed picture is a whole label in miniature. LAKE CHELAN BRAND shows a man in a brown hat, pipe in his mouth, sitting in a small boat with a fish on the line, snow-capped mountains behind him and the lake splashing around the bow. Printed in the water is the name of the Chelan growers' union that packed the fruit, so one union's own brand rides inside the Skookum label.

The lake in the picture is real, and it is remarkable. Lake Chelan is a narrow glacial lake 50.5 miles long, with a maximum depth of 1,486 feet. That makes it the third deepest lake in the United States, after Crater Lake and Lake Tahoe. Its name comes from a Salish word, Tsi-Laan, meaning "deep water." The City of Chelan sits at its southern end. The angler on the label was fishing good water, too: in 2013 a 35.63-pound lake trout caught there set the Washington state record.

🏙️ Wenatchee, the Apple Capital of the World

Wenatchee takes its name from the Wenatchi people. The Great Northern Railway, which finished its line to Seattle in 1893, gave the valley a way to ship fruit, and by the early twentieth century the Wenatchee Commercial Club was promoting the city as the "Home of the World's Best Apples."

Skookum was part of the skyline. The Wenatchee World reported that the Skookum sign was built in 1921 on top of the old Wenatchee Hotel at Orondo and Wenatchee avenues. It later stood at the old Skookum apple packing warehouse, and in June 2022, after 101 years, it was taken down and put into storage.

🪶 The Face on the Label

The figure at the lower right is a cartoon: a round smiling face with rosy cheeks, dark hair in two braids wrapped in red-orange, and one red-orange feather. The label does not name it. Good Fruit Grower calls the brand's figure "the smiling Indian boy," and it notes that Skookum and the rival Yum-Yum labels were both built on Native American images to sell fruit.

That imagery is part of the history, and the people who look after that history have not ignored it. In 2016 the Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center mounted an exhibit called "Everything Skookum." Its curator of collections, Melanie Eastman, wrote that the brand's caricature had become controversial, and that the museum consulted a tribal advisory council on how to show it. Yakima history teacher and label collector Thomas Hull has described the way many crate labels portrayed Native Americans as flat and dismissive. This label is offered as the record of that time, as printed.

📦 When the Wooden Crates Went Away

Labels like this were pasted on the ends of wooden fruit crates from the late 1800s. Northwest growers switched to cardboard boxes in the 1950s, and the paper labels went with the crates. Today they are kept as history. Washington State University's crate label collection holds 489 unused labels, most of them from Washington, with Skookum labels among them. Yakima Valley Libraries keeps labels in its archives, and the Yakima Valley Museum's volunteer curator has collected about 4,000.

🔎 Condition

Unused, with little to no wear: the sheet was never pasted to a crate, and the back is plain with the front design faintly showing through.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🖼️ Framed in a kitchen, where a crate label was always meant to be seen
• 🍎 Beside other Wenatchee and Chelan apple labels for a Washington orchard wall
• 🎣 In a cabin or lake house, for the Lake Chelan angler in the corner
• 📚 With a Chinook Jargon dictionary or Pacific Northwest history books
• 🎁 For anyone from Wenatchee, Chelan or the apple country of central Washington

🎁 Who Collects These

Crate label collectors want Skookum because it is one of the Northwest's landmark brands, and a Skookum label that carries a second brand in its corner is a double find. Washington history collectors want the Wenatchee and Chelan names. Advertising collectors study the brand's imagery and what it says about its time. And anyone who grew up among the orchards around Wenatchee knows the name Skookum on sight.

❓ Questions People Ask

What does Skookum mean?
A Chinook Jargon word for strength and quality, still heard in the Pacific Northwest as praise.

Is this a 1916 label?
No. 1916 is the design's copyright year, printed into the artwork. It is not the date the sheet was printed.

What is the Lake Chelan picture?
A second brand shown as an inset. Its fruit was grown and packed by a Chelan growers' union and certified by the Skookum association.

What does S.P.A. stand for?
The copyright line abbreviates it; the association named in large letters on the same label is the Skookum Packers Association.

Was it ever used on a crate?
No. It is an unused sheet with a plain back.

How big is it?
11" x 9" ~.