Vintage 1950s Mad River Pears Crate Label - Washington Memorabilia 🍐

Size: 10 1/4" x 8 3/4" ~ little to no wear. They vary a little one to the next.

🍐 Two Grades, Same Waterfall

I stock this label two ways: with a red-orange border, and running the full design to the edge in blue. That's not two different designs - it's the same waterfall, the same pear, the same lettering - it's a grading convention. Pacific Northwest packers commonly used blue labels for Extra Fancy fruit and red for Fancy, and that's exactly the pattern here: the blue is the top grade, the red-bordered version one step down. Mad River used the same waterfall art on its apple labels too, in blue and green, so the two colors here aren't the whole story of what this company printed - just the two pear grades I happen to carry.

🏞️ Entiat, Washington

Mad River Orchard Co. packed out of Entiat, a small Chelan County town on the Columbia, in the heart of Washington's fruit country. William F. Cannon planted the area's first commercial orchard there in 1893; the railroad reached town in 1914, bringing fruit warehouses and cold storage right up alongside the tracks. Entiat burned twice, in 1915 and 1921, and didn't formally incorporate until 1944. Then work began on the Rocky Reach Dam in 1956, and its reservoir forced the whole town to move a third time. The 1960 census counted 357 people, and the "third town" opened in 1961. Only three of Entiat's fruit warehouses were rebuilt on the new site. Mad River's was one of them - it's still standing today, run now as Naumes & Skookum.

🌊 The Mad River Itself

The label's namesake really does run through this country: the Mad River rises in the Cascades in Chelan County and joins the Entiat River upstream at Ardenvoir. "Entiat" itself comes from the Salishan for "place of grassy water." Nothing I've found says whether the particular cascade painted on the label - white water breaking over dark boulders, a couple of conifers on the bank - is a real, named spot on the river or the artist's impression of it; either way, that's the Mad River as the label's artist saw it, rushing down toward the Entiat.

🏭 Packed By, Printed By

The label says "PACKED BY Mad River Orchard Co.," and by the 1950s the company had 240 acres of fruit trees and a real business growing, packing, storing and selling apples and pears. A 1978 court case even records the company losing some 60,000 boxes of stored apples to an ammonia leak in leased cold-storage rooms in Wenatchee - the kind of thing that actually happens to a working packing house. The label itself was printed by Stecher-Traung of San Francisco, a lithographer that operated under that name until it merged with Schmidt Lithograph in 1966 to become Stecher-Traung-Schmidt - which puts this printing somewhere in the decades before that. Washington State University's library holds five Mad River labels from Entiat in its own collection, donor-dated to the early 1950s. Wooden fruit crates like the ones these labels were printed for were being replaced by corrugated cardboard boxes through the 1950s - one more marker that places this printing in that same mid-century window.