Vintage 1950s Mayflower Brand Crate Label 🍎 California Fruits, Mayflower Fruit Ass'n, Exeter California, Blue Anchor Galleon Art

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This 1950s Mayflower crate label was grown and packed by the Mayflower Fruit Association of Exeter, Tulare County, California. Measuring 13" × 4", it represents mid-century California fruit packaging in an elongated strip format.

The label remains New Old Stock, unused and unmounted, with no wear.

Elongated strip crate labels were commonly used for side-panel branding on fruit crates and are valued for their distinctive proportions and strong graphic presence when preserved unused. This example is well suited for collectors of California agricultural history and crate label art.

📋 What Is Printed On This Label

Every line of type on the sheet, transcribed from the label itself rather than paraphrased:

• Mayflower
• BRAND
• California Fruits
• PRODUCE OF U.S.A.
• GROWN AND PACKED BY
• MAYFLOWER FRUIT ASS'N.
• EXETER, CALIFORNIA
• CALIFORNIA FRUIT EXCHANGE
• BLUE ANCHOR
• REG.U.S.PAT.OFFICE
• SCHMIDT L. CO. FRESNO.

Printer: the lithographer is named on the sheet — SCHMIDT L. CO. FRESNO., set in microtype in the margin.

Blue Anchor / California Fruit Exchange. The round anchor emblem printed on this sheet is the mark of the California Fruit Exchange, the Sacramento-based co-operative that marketed California's deciduous fruit — pears, grapes, plums and stone fruit — under the Blue Anchor brand. It is a different organisation from the California Fruit Growers Exchange, whose mark is Sunkist and whose business was citrus. The two are constantly confused; this label belongs to the deciduous side and carries no Sunkist mark.

The printer signed it, and the plant matters. SCHMIDT L. CO. FRESNO. is printed in pale blue microtype at the lower right, just below the oval vignette. Schmidt Lithograph Company ran plants in several California cities, and this sheet came off the Fresno plant — the Channel Lemons label from the same collection carries Schmidt's Los Angeles imprint instead. Same firm, two different houses, and the imprints say so.

The product line is "California Fruits". That is what the sheet prints, in green script — no single fruit is named on it anywhere. GROWN AND PACKED BY / MAYFLOWER FRUIT ASS'N. / EXETER, CALIFORNIA is the printed relationship, and REG.U.S.PAT.OFFICE is set in microtype at the extreme lower left, spelled out in full.

The picture. A tall vertical oval vignette with a brown rim at the right end of a solid black sheet, containing a three-masted galleon under full ochre-yellow sail on a deep blue sea, a blue armorial flag at the mainmast and an orange-and-yellow pennant above, against a warm gold sky.

A natural pair. The same Mayflower Fruit Ass'n. of Exeter also shipped under the Pilgrim brand, and both sheets survive in this collection. The Pilgrim and the Mayflower were designed to be seen together.