Vintage Lady Rowena Crate Label 🍇 Ivanhoe, CA 1950s Knights Duel Medieval

Who Was Lady Rowena? ⚔️ Lady Rowena Brand Emperor Grapes, Ivanhoe Fruit Association, Ivanhoe, California

Size: 13" x 4" ~ New old stock, never pasted to a crate.

Very neat medieval image of a Lady watching a duel! A red-haired lady in a white gown, veil and crimson cloak sits her chestnut horse in front of a towered castle, while out on the field two little mounted knights in armor go at each other with swords, one in green and one in red. Lady Rowena runs across the deep navy ground in big cream Old English letters, EMPERORS sits in red in its own mint-green panel, and the Blue Anchor emblem is tucked in the corner.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• NET WEIGHT 28 LBS. and PRODUCE OF U. S. A.
• Lady Rowena BRAND, CALIFORNIA FRUITS
• EMPERORS
• PACKED AND SHIPPED BY IVANHOE FRUIT ASSOCIATION, IVANHOE, CALIFORNIA
• The anchor emblem: CALIFORNIA FRUIT EXCHANGE, BLUE ANCHOR

EMPERORS is the grape, the big late-season red Emperor that shipped so well. The back is blank.

📖 A Walter Scott Joke

The whole thing is a Walter Scott joke, which I love. The town is called Ivanhoe, and the brand is Lady Rowena. In Scott's novel Ivanhoe, published in December 1819, Rowena is Cedric's ward, a Saxon princess descended from the old kings, and at the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouch Ivanhoe names her Queen of Love and Beauty. She marries him at the end. The Ivanhoe Fruit Association named several of its brands right out of the book, Ivanhoe, Lady Rowena and Robin Hood among them.

The town got its name the same way, the way the local story tells it. Ivanhoe sits in Tulare County out in the San Joaquin Valley, and its first school, opened in 1886, was named Ivanhoe after the novel. The railroad called its siding there Klink, after one of its auditors, but it was the schoolhouse name that stuck, so a book named a school, the school named a town, and the town named its fruit for the characters. The Ivanhoe Fruit Association's packing plant was the forerunner of Klink Citrus in Ivanhoe.

⚓ The Blue Anchor

The California Fruit Exchange was a growers' co-operative incorporated on May 1, 1901, with member associations from Loomis, Newcastle and Penryn, and it grew into the biggest marketer of fresh deciduous fruit and table grapes in the West, around a thousand growers selling into more than three hundred North American markets and twenty-two countries overseas. George H. Cutter, one of its founders, suggested the anchor as a symbol as early as 1903. It was first used in 1904 and registered as a trademark in 1923 for the top grade of fruit, and in 1969 the co-op renamed itself Blue Anchor, Inc., carrying on until 2000. The Ephemera Society of America dates a Lady Rowena Emperor grape label to around the 1950s.

🖼️ 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. What is left is what there is. Once the last of these are on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire, and no one is printing more.

Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum! My pictures seriously don't do it justice.

This piece is within 30 years of full antique status.