Vintage 1950s Judy Brand Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potatoes Crate Label 🍠 — Sam Gothelf, Carencro LA, Walle & Co. New Orleans

Who Packed Judy Brand Sweet Potatoes? 🍠 Judy Brand Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potatoes, Sam Gothelf, Carencro, Louisiana

Size: 9" x 9" ~ Unused.

Beautiful label from the Bayou State! This is a vintage 1950s Judy Brand sweet potato crate label, with Sam Gothelf of Carencro, Louisiana named as the packer. Four big fat sweet potatoes are piled on a plate with a sunburst fanning out behind them, JUDY across the top in huge block letters, Louisiana in a swoopy script under it, and SWEET POTATOES arching over the plate. A banner in the corner carries the grade, U.S. No 2.

My pictures seriously don't do it justice.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• The weight: 50 LBS NET WHEN PACKED
• Where it was grown: PRODUCE OF U.S.A.
• The brand: JUDY BRAND
• The variety: Louisiana PORTO RICAN SWEET POTATOES
• The handling: HAND SELECTED / HAND PACKED
• The packer: PACKED BY SAM GOTHELF, CARENCRO, LA.
• The grade, on the red corner banner: U.S. No 2
• WALLE & Co., Inc. N. O., LA. (the printer, in tiny type at the lower left)

That tiny printer's line in the corner is a New Orleans name with a long history. Walle started out as a lithography firm in New Orleans in 1872, and from 1902 until World War I Walle & Company held the rights to print every one of the city's Carnival parade bulletins, the big color sheets that showed each Mardi Gras float for the newspapers. The company went on printing labels for another century. It was bought by the Fort Dearborn Company, and its last label factory, out in Harahan, shut down in February 2020, 147 years after it started. So Sam Gothelf's sweet potatoes went out wearing a label from the same press that dressed up Mardi Gras.

There are two printings of Judy, by the way. The other one adds KILN DRIED under SWEET POTATOES; these are the plain printing, without it. And if those four sweet potatoes look familiar, they're the very same drawing Walle used on Sam's Ilene label out of Lafayette, just colored a little redder here.

🚚 Sam Gothelf, the Chicago Produce Man Who Became Mr. Yam

Here's the part I love. Sam Gothelf wasn't a Cajun at all. He was a native of Chicago, and in April 1950 the census found him there running his own wholesale produce company. The Acadiana papers first mention "Mr. Sam Gothelf" in the summer of 1951, in the news column from Arnaudville, about eight miles from Carencro, and by the middle of 1952 the family was living in Lafayette. He packed under a whole little family of brands, Judy here at Carencro, and Ilene, Princess, Queen and King out of Lafayette, and in December 1953 alone he trucked more than 2,600 crates of graded Louisiana yams to a buyer in Indianapolis.

In 1954 he and two partners, Odon Leger and Dominic Culotta, started St. Landry Packing Co., Inc. in Sunset. In 1957 the Yambilee in Opelousas named him Mr. Yam, which was supposed to be a surprise until a Lafayette TV station let his name out early, and in 1960 he went 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.

Who Judy was, I can't tell you. Sam had daughters, and none of them was a Judy, so she's a little mystery printed in big cream letters.

🗓️ How Old Is It?

Early 1950s, most likely. Nothing on it is dated, and the printer's line, WALLE & Co., Inc, only tells you it's no older than 1929, when Walle reorganized under that name. Sam Gothelf settles the rest: he was still in Chicago in 1950 and doesn't turn up in Acadiana until 1951. Nothing I've found ties him to Carencro except this label, but the papers find him eight miles away in Arnaudville in 1951 and in Lafayette a year later, so my bet is that Judy comes from his first few years down there. You'll see it called 1930s out there, but the man who packed it wasn't in Louisiana yet.

🍠 Porto Rico, the Potato That Built an Industry

PORTO RICAN is the variety, and it was the one Louisiana's sweet potato business was built on. When Julian C. Miller came to LSU, most folks in Louisiana grew sweet potatoes on a small scale to feed their families and their livestock. In 1934 Miller found the Unit 1 Porto Rico, a mutation of the popular Porto Rico with moist orange flesh, and his biography says it "resulted in the development of a new agricultural industry in Louisiana." In 1937 he worked out a way to get sweet potato plants to flower and set seed in Louisiana's climate, which is where real sweet potato breeding in this country started.

That same year, 1937, Louisiana growers got the go-ahead to sell their sweeter, softer, more golden potatoes as "yams," to set them apart from the dry, mealy kind folks up north were used to, as long as the words sweet potato also appeared on the label. This one just calls them what they are, Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potatoes, hand selected and hand packed, fifty pounds to the crate.

🦅 Carencro and the Carrion Crows

Carencro sits in Lafayette Parish in the heart of Acadiana, and it has one of the best town names going. It was first called St. Pierre and took the name Carencro in the late 1800s, after the carrion crows, the vultures, that the Cajun French call carencro. The story goes that the local Native Americans told the first settlers about great flocks of buzzards gathered to feast along the river. One old account says the feast was a mastodon that died on the bayou, that Bayou Carencro takes its name from the spot, and that the giant's fossil bones were later shipped off to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and lost at sea. I love that one.

Few Europeans settled around there until the Acadians came. Some of the Acadians sent to the Attakapas district in 1765 were given land along Bayou Carencro, and their families ran cattle on it. By 1889 the area had two sugar factories and cotton gins going, and 1,800 bales of cotton were shipped from the Carencro Station on Morgan's Railroad that year. Judy wasn't the only sweet potato brand to ship out of Carencro, either, but it's the prettiest one I've come across.

🏡 Display

To me, crate labels are a window onto a bygone era, and I still think the lithography behind them is unmatched, even now. Museums and art institutes have set aside galleries for them, and collectors keep reaching for them in growing numbers to help preserve that history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries then they will be very difficult to acquire.

Picture this amazing vintage advertising as home decor on the wall of any room in your house, rather than in a museum! It's a natural for a kitchen, especially around Thanksgiving, and a perfect gift for anybody from Carencro, Lafayette or anywhere in Acadiana, or anybody named Judy.