Vintage 1950s Deer Valley Crate Label 🦌 Glendale, AZ, Neat History Mafia Farmers?

Who Packed Deer Valley Vegetables? 🦌 Deer Valley Vegetables Crate Label, Arrowhead Ranches of Glendale, Arizona

Size: 6 3/4" x 4 1/2" ~ Little to no wear.

This is a vintage Deer Valley Vegetables crate label, packed by Arrowhead Ranches out of Glendale, Arizona: a big-antlered buck looking out over a valley of row crops, farmhouses and desert mountains, with DEER VALLEY across the sky and VEGETABLES on a banner underneath.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• DEER VALLEY
• VEGETABLES
• an arrowhead device over arrowhead ranches,
• PRODUCE OF U.S.A.
• GLENDALE, ARIZONA

There's a line of tiny red print down in the lower right corner, and the back is blank, with the lettering showing through in reverse.

📜 The Deer Valley Brand

Deer Valley was the ranch's own registered brand. Martori Bros., Distributors, doing business as Arrowhead Ranches of Glendale, filed it as a trademark on August 24, 1971 and registered it on September 26, 1972 as Reg. No. 943,736, for fresh grapes, and they said they had been using the name at least as early as 1940. Back in the 1950s and 1960s the outfit went by Arrowhead Ranches, Inc., and that's the name that turns up in federal farm and trademark records from those years.

🍋 Arrowhead Ranch and the Arizona Project

Arrowhead Ranch was a citrus farm in the desert north of Glendale, Arizona, thousands of lemon and orange trees in tidy rows, as The Arizona Republic's Jen Fifield described it. It also has a wild history. According to her 2019 reporting in the Republic, the ranch was incorporated in 1955 by five men, two of whom were among Detroit's most wanted Mafia men in Don Bolles' day, and over the years it was owned by what she called a tangled web of produce men and mobsters. By the 1970s it was held by a corporation owned in part by Robert Goldwater, brother of Senator Barry Goldwater, who denied knowing the mobsters.

Don Bolles was the Arizona Republic reporter who dug into organized crime in the state, and he was killed when six sticks of dynamite went off under his car in Phoenix on June 2, 1976. More than 40 reporters from 23 news organizations came to Arizona to finish his work, and in March 1977 they published The Arizona Project, 23 articles and over 100,000 words. One of them looked at Arrowhead Ranch exploiting undocumented workers, and said that whenever the Border Patrol planned a raid, spies from the ranch were tipped off. In October 1977 undocumented workers at Arrowhead Ranch went out on strike. The ranch was bought for development in 1978, and Glendale annexed it in 1979, so the groves are neighborhoods now.

🖼️ Display

Crate Labels are a reminder of a bygone era but the amazing lithography process 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 these out to preserve their history. Old stock like this doesn't come back. Once the supply for sale is gone and these labels are framed in homes and galleries, they will be very hard to get.

Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum!