{"product_id":"vintage-1950s-ilene-sweet-potato-crate-label-sam-gothelf-lafayette-la","title":"Vintage 1950s Ilene Brand Sweet Potato Crate Label 🍠 Lafayette Louisiana Porto Rican Yams, Sam Gothelf","description":"\u003ch2\u003eWho Packed Ilene Brand Sweet Potatoes? 🍠 Ilene: A Sweet Potato Label Straight Out of Acadiana\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 9\" x 9\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-ZrOzPOLLFg\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis one is pure Louisiana. ILENE BRAND sits over four sweet potatoes on a shield that reads LOUISIANA PORTO RICAN SWEET POTATOES, HAND SELECTED and HAND PACKED. Down at the point, in green, is the man who filled the crate: Sam Gothelf of Lafayette. The margins carry the net weight and the federal grade, and below the shield, in type almost too small to read, is the name of a New Orleans printer with a Mardi Gras past.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese are new old stock, never pasted to a crate, and each one carries all of that.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e🚚 Sam Gothelf Was Shipping Yams by the Hundreds of Crates\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere's what I love: Sam Gothelf was a real working packer, and you can watch him work. In the first three weeks of December 1953 he sold five lots of Louisiana yams to a produce buyer in Indianapolis, more than 2,600 crates in all. Around December 1 it was 400 crates of U.S. No. 1 at $3.05 a crate and 100 crates of U.S. No. 2 at $1.70, and more lots followed on December 5, 11, 14 and 21, the No. 2 crates fetching anywhere from $1.70 to $3. The yams went north by truck, and twice Sam even advanced cash to the truckman to get a load on the road.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen the buyer's checks bounced, all five of them. Five $400 payments in July and September 1954 still left $6,849.50 owed to Sam Gothelf. The U.S. Department of Agriculture took the case under the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act, the federal law that polices the produce trade, and in July 1955 it revoked the buyer's license. That ruling is how the price of a crate of Gothelf yams that winter survives to the penny, seventy-odd years on.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe wasn't working alone out there. The same ruling names his neighbors who sold yams to that Indianapolis buyer between 1952 and 1954: Fred Sonnier and Willie Lormond of Scott, C. J. Borel of Carencro, Leo Prejean of Lawtell, the Lahaya Brothers of Leonville and Prescott Wills of Church Point. Prejean alone shipped sixteen lots, starting in January 1952, and Sonnier's lot of December 21, 1953 was 400 crates of No. 1 yams at $4.05, delivered at Indianapolis. Picture a ring of little Acadiana towns around Lafayette, all of them crating yams and trucking them north to Midwestern supper tables.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe funny thing is, Sam wasn't a Louisiana boy at all. He was a native of Chicago, and when the census taker came around in April 1950 he was still there, running his own wholesale produce company, with his daughters at home, all of them born in Illinois. The Acadiana papers first pick up \"Mr. Sam Gothelf\" in the summer of 1951, in the Arnaudville news column, and by the middle of 1952 the family was living in Lafayette. So a Chicago produce man came south to where the yams grew, and he stayed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd he took to it. In 1954 he and two partners, Odon Leger and Dominic Culotta, started St. Landry Packing Co., Inc. over in Sunset. In 1957 the Yambilee in Opelousas named him Mr. Yam, and it was supposed to be a surprise, but a Lafayette TV station let his name slip before the release date, so by the time he was presented at the ball as Sam Gothelf of Sunset, plenty of folks already knew. In 1960 he rode along on the Yambilee's goodwill tour to Chicago's South Water Market, the produce row where his brother still had a stall. He lived in Lafayette for twenty-five years before he retired.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIlene wasn't his only brand, either. Sam Gothelf packed under a whole little royal family of labels: a Princess, a Queen and a King out of Lafayette, plus a Judy brand packed at Carencro, just up the road. The Lafayette ones come in the same 9 x 9 inch square, which sits neatly on the end of a Louisiana sweet potato crate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e👧 So Who Was Ilene?\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePackers loved to name a brand for somebody at home. In the crate-label days, growers and packers ordered labels showing their children, their wives, their houses and even their pets, and one Texas packing shed in Mission named its Billy Joe label for the owner's son. Sam Gothelf's lineup of Princess, Queen, King and Judy has that same family-and-royalty ring to it. And here is the family story I like best: in February 1954 the Lafayette paper mentioned Ilene Gothelf, the nine-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Sam Gothelf. I'd bet a nickel this brand was named for her.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e🗺️ Lafayette, the Hub City of Sweet Potato Country\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLafayette started life in 1821 as Vermilionville, was incorporated in 1836, and took its present name in 1884 in honor of General Lafayette. It is the parish seat of Lafayette Parish and sits at the center of Acadiana, the Cajun heart of south Louisiana, and folks there call it the Hub City. The college in town was founded in 1898 as Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute, opened its doors in 1901, and became the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1960. In the 1940s, with oil found in the parish, petroleum and natural gas grew to dominate the local economy, but the fields around town kept right on growing sweet potatoes.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd what sweet potato country it was. A federal handbook written in 1952 placed Louisiana's crop in St. Landry, Lafayette and Acadia parishes and judged that sweet potato growing was probably more concentrated in south-central Louisiana than anywhere else in the nation. Louisiana was the largest producing area for the varieties best suited to drying, which is why most of the sweet potato dehydrating of World War II was done there, and the national crop peaked in the war year of 1943. Louisiana dug its potatoes from late July to about the middle of November; after that the trade ran on cured potatoes out of storage, which is exactly what Sam Gothelf was trucking north that December.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHAND SELECTED, HAND PACKED was no idle boast, either. Sweet potatoes had to be lifted out of the ground by hand, with great care so they wouldn't scratch or bruise, and pickers often wore cotton gloves for the job. Each grade went into its own crate right there in the row as the potatoes were picked up.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e🌱 \"Louisiana Porto Rican\": The Potato That Built an Industry\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat yellow line at the top of the shield names the variety. The Porto Rico was the dominant sweet potato in the United States from the 1930s through the 1950s, a moist, orange-fleshed potato that took over most of the Southern acreage, and the 1952 handbook called it the most widely grown variety of all because it yielded well, shrugged off disease and kept well in storage. Louisiana made it its own, which is why the state's name sits right in front of it on this label.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen came the yam, and this is where I grin. The story goes that in 1937 Louisiana's growers, whose potatoes were coming out sweeter, softer and more golden with help from Dr. Julian C. Miller's horticulture researchers at LSU, won the right to sell them as yams, to set them apart from the dry, mealy Jersey sweet potatoes that Northern buyers were used to. Washington had one condition: \"sweet potato\" had to go on the label too. Botanists have been grumbling ever since, because a true yam is a different plant altogether. Even that 1952 federal handbook sorted sweet potatoes into \"moist-fleshed\" kinds, sometimes called yams, and \"dry-fleshed\" Jerseys, then admitted that, strange to say, the dry ones actually hold more water. This label plays it straight with SWEET POTATOES in big arched letters, while the federal ruling on Sam Gothelf's 1953 shipments called every lot of them yams.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne more wrinkle for the word nerds: the island became \"Puerto Rico\" by act of Congress in 1932, but the sweet potato kept its old \"Porto Rico\" spelling for decades afterward; North Carolina was still releasing an improved N.C. Porto Rico 198 in 1966. And next door in Opelousas, the growers threw the crop its own party. The Yambilee began in 1946, and Opelousas shipper Felix Dezauche was a major force behind it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e📦 \"50 Lbs. Net When Packed\" and \"U.S. No. 2\"\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThose two corner lines tell you exactly what job this label had. Louisiana's sweet potato trade settled on one standard container for the field, the storage house and the market: a wire-bound, collapsible crate of veneer slats, nearly a cube, first known as the James crate. It measured about 13 x 14 x 17 inches, an empty one cost 36 to 45 cents in 1952, and a 9 x 9 inch label sits right on its end. Here's the neat part: that crate held about 55 pounds of potatoes fresh from the field but only 50 once they were cured and stored, because a sweet potato gives up weight as it keeps. So \"when packed\" is the packer being square with you: fifty pounds at his shed, whatever the long ride north did to them afterward.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe grades go back a long way. The Agriculture Department floated tentative sweet potato grades in April 1918 and published its recommended U.S. grades in May 1920, in a circular by Hartley E. Truax, openly admitting it had no power to force them on anybody and hoping the trade would take them up anyway to steady the market. Under those first grades a U.S. No. 2 was sound sweet potatoes of similar variety that missed No. 1, free from serious damage by dirt, frost, decay, bruises, cuts, cracks, disease or insects, and 1 1\/2 to 3 1\/2 inches across. \"Serious\" had a precise meaning: whatever was wrong had to trim away with no more than ten percent extra waste. A U.S. No. 1 had to measure 1 3\/4 to 3 1\/2 inches in diameter and 4 to 10 inches long. On Sam Gothelf's December 1953 lots, a No. 1 crate brought between $1 and $1.90 more than a No. 2. A No. 2 still bakes up fine, mind you. It just doesn't win beauty contests.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e🎭 Printed by the House That Printed Mardi Gras\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLook just under the shield's point and you'll find a line of type so small it's easy to miss: the printer's credit, WALLE \u0026amp; Co. INC., followed by N.O. LA. for New Orleans, Louisiana. That is Walle \u0026amp; Company, and what a name to find on a yam label. The firm counted its beginnings from 1872, the same year Rex, the King of Carnival, was founded. Its name came together in steps: the New Orleans Lithographing Company in 1883, Koeckert \u0026amp; Walle once John Walle joined as a partner in 1889, and Walle \u0026amp; Co. by 1897, after Gustav Koeckert died. It built its name on chromolithographed Mardi Gras posters, labels and stock certificates.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCarnival was the showpiece. Walle printed Carnival editions, big color prints of a krewe's parade pageant, some of them better than three feet wide. The Library of Congress holds Walle's 1913 Carnival edition of the Rex pageant, and a 1906 Carnival edition for the Knights of Momus carries the Walle name as well.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe everyday work was labels, and it went back a long way: the Library of Congress also holds a set of Koeckert \u0026amp; Walle color-lithographed advertisements for molasses brands named after birds, from about 1891. The firm was styled Walle \u0026amp; Co., Ltd. in the years before the First World War, and in 1929 it reorganized as Walle \u0026amp; Co. Inc., the very name printed on this sheet. By 1937 it was listed as Walle \u0026amp; Co., Inc. on Tchoupitoulas Street, a 1948 packaging trade key lists it among the label printers, and it kept supplying labels to Southern packers and canners for decades; in 1959 a canning trade journal credited Walle \u0026amp; Co., Inc. of New Orleans with the red, white, blue and green labels on a New Orleans pickle maker's new jars. As Walle Corporation it was still printing labels in our own century. Its Harahan label plant, just outside New Orleans, closed in early 2020, soon after Chicago-based Fort Dearborn bought the company, and the newspapers called it a 147-year-old labeling factory.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e🔥 Saved From the Burn Pile\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePaper crate labels first turned up in America in the 1880s, and for the next seventy-odd years they rode the ends of wooden crates to market. Then, by the mid-1950s, packers discovered the pre-printed cardboard box, and the switch was so sudden that it left mountains of unused labels behind. Many were thrown out or burned. The ones that made it were saved by collectors and by the people who had worked in the packing houses. That's the legacy you're holding: each of these Ilene labels is flat and never pasted, with a plain buff back that has never known glue.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e🗓️ How Old Is It?\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI call it 1950s, early 1950s most likely, and here's why. The printer's line reads Walle \u0026amp; Co. INC., a name the firm took in 1929 and kept for decades, so that only tells you it can't be older than 1929. Sam Gothelf tells you the rest. He was in Chicago in the 1940 census and still there, running his produce business, in April 1950. He turns up in Acadiana in 1951, he was crating graded yams in Lafayette in 1953, and by 1954 he was a partner in a packing company over in Sunset. Ilene, the daughter I'm betting the brand was named for, was born around 1944. And wooden-crate labels like this were on their way out by the middle and late 1950s. You'll see his Lafayette labels called 1940s out there, but the man himself wasn't in Louisiana yet. No year is printed on it anywhere, and the early 1950s is where all of that lands.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e🖼️ How to Live With It\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🍠 Frame it as warm kitchen art — the glowing sweet potatoes and bold red lettering are a natural over a stove, a sink or a farmhouse table.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🍂 Set it out at Thanksgiving, right beside the candied yams.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🌴 Give it to anyone with Lafayette or Acadiana roots — a real local packer's label is a specific piece of home.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🎭 Pair it with your Mardi Gras things, since the same New Orleans house printed Carnival prints for Rex and Momus.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🥗 Hang it with other fruit and vegetable labels for a produce wall that celebrates the golden age of package art.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🎁 An easy, genuinely vintage gift for a cook, a gardener or a lover of Southern history.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e🌞 It's flat, light and square, so a plain frame with a neutral acid-free mat does the trick; hang it out of direct sun and handle it by the edges to keep those reds and blues strong.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e❓ Quick Answers\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWho was Sam Gothelf?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA Chicago produce man who came to Acadiana around 1951 and packed yams in Lafayette, Louisiana; his name is printed on the label. In December 1953 he sold U.S. No. 1 and No. 2 yams by the crate to a buyer in Indianapolis, shipped north by truck. He packed under Ilene, Princess, Queen, King and Judy brands, and in 1957 the Yambilee named him Mr. Yam.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eAre yams and sweet potatoes the same thing here?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYes. Louisiana began selling its moist orange Porto Rico sweet potatoes as yams in 1937, with \"sweet potato\" required on the label too.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWho printed it?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe New Orleans lithographers Walle \u0026amp; Co. Inc., the same house that printed Carnival editions for Rex and the Knights of Momus before World War I.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eIs it an original?\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYes, original period printing, unused and never applied, with a blank back.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e✨ Why This One Gets Me\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat gets me about this label is how much real life is packed into one 9-inch square of paper. A Chicago produce man turned Lafayette yam packer who put a girl's name on his crates, thousands of crates trucked north in the winter of 1953 for a buyer whose checks bounced, a potato Louisiana bred and renamed and threw a festival for, and a New Orleans printer that also dressed Carnival. Sam Gothelf did his job with pride, four hand-picked yams under a name in red, and these labels sat unused long enough to outlive the wooden crate itself. Hang one in your kitchen, send one to a friend from Lafayette, and give his packing shed one more season in the sun.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🏷️ What Is Printed on Each Label\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eILENE\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBRAND\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLOUISIANA PORTO RICAN\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSWEET POTATOES\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHAND SELECTED\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHAND PACKED\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePACKED BY\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSAM GOTHELF\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLAFAYETTE, LA.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e50 LBS. NET\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWHEN PACKED\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eU.S. No. 2\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWALLE \u0026amp; Co. INC. N.O. LA.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWalle printed the sheet and Sam Gothelf packed the potatoes; the printer's microtype sits centered in the pale-blue margin under the shield's point, and the grade is set on a rising diagonal.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-judy-sweet-potatoes-crate-label-carencro-la-1930s-treasures\"\u003eAntique 1930s Judy Brand Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potatoes Crate Label 🍠 — Sam Gothelf, Carencro LA, Walle \u0026amp; Co. New Orleans\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-princess-crate-label-lafayette-la-1940s-beauty-treasures-gifts\"\u003eVintage Princess Crate Label 👸 from 1940s Louisiana\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/antique-1930s-sweet-adeline-crate-label-carencro-la-treasures-gifts\"\u003eAntique 1930s Sweet Adeline Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potatoes Crate Label 🍠 — Simon Latour, Carencro LA, Bosco Oil Field Section\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43639015440616,"sku":"VAG-7914631823592","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/2718\/4037\/files\/il_fullxfull.4062097892_m1xv.jpg?v=1785357683","url":"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-1950s-ilene-sweet-potato-crate-label-sam-gothelf-lafayette-la","provider":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","version":"1.0","type":"link"}