Vintage 1960s Deer Mark Brand Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potato Crate Label 🦌 — Opelousas Sweet Potato Co., Sunset & Hammond LA

Who Packed Deer Mark Sweet Potatoes? 🦌 Vintage 1960s Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potato Crate Label, Sunset LA

Size: 9" x 9"

🦌 A big buck with a full rack of antlers on a red ground, two fat golden sweet potatoes laid in front of him, and DEER MARK across the top. It's an unused sweet potato crate label from Sunset, Louisiana, the little St. Landry Parish town that once shipped more yams than any place in the world.

🔍 What's On It

DEER MARK BRAND, LOUISIANA PORTO RICAN SWEET POTATOES, and in the black band at the bottom, DISTRIBUTED BY LOUISIANA STRAWBERRY & VEGETABLE DIST. CO., HAMMOND, LOUISIANA on one side and U. S. No. 1, NET WT. 50 LBS., PACKED BY OPELOUSAS SWEET POTATO CO., SUNSET, LOUISIANA on the other. Porto Rican was the variety, the big Louisiana sweet potato of the day, and fifty pounds was the standard bushel crate the state even taxed by. There's no printer's name and no date, and the back is blank.

🍠 The Packer and the Distributor

The Opelousas Sweet Potato Co. was a Potier family business. The state corporation records show it started out as Potier & Marks Produce Co. and Wilton Potier & Sons Produce Co. before it took the Opelousas Sweet Potato Company name on December 1, 1959, and it was still shipping from Sunset into the 1980s. In 1970 the company was one of the shippers who sued over the state's sweet potato promotion tax of four cents on every fifty-pound bushel, and in 1972 the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled against them.

The distributor was a strawberry house. Louisiana Strawberry & Vegetable Distributing Co. was George Beridon's outfit at 411 North Cherry Street in Hammond, in Louisiana's strawberry country, and Beridon was vice-chairman of the state's strawberry promotion commission. By the late 1960s the company was doing business down in the Rio Grande Valley at McAllen, Texas, and a sister label from the same packer prints it that way, with a McAllen ZIP code. Deer Mark still says Hammond, so it's the earlier printing, and with that 1959 company name on it, it comes from the 1960s.

🌅 Sunset, the Sweet Potato Capital

The first commercial sweet potato district in Louisiana grew up around Sunset in about 1910. The state's historical marker in Opelousas says John Sibille brought the sweet potato to the area and made Sunset the world's largest shipping point for yams in the 1940s and 1950s, the "Sweet Potato Capital of the World," with 56 shippers, each with their own labels. Deer Mark was one of them. Louisiana's growers started calling their moist orange sweet potatoes "yams" in 1937, and LSU's Unit 1 Porto Rico sent the state's crop all over the country.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1960s Deer Mark sweet potato crate label, a buck and two sweet potatoes on red
• Packed in Sunset, St. Landry Parish; distributed out of Hammond
• About 9" x 9", unused, New Old Stock
• You'll get one label like the ones shown

🖼️ It's a handsome square label for a farmhouse kitchen, a hunting camp or a den, and a great gift for anybody from St. Landry Parish or Hammond.