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

The Mayflower in California? ⛵ Vintage 1950s Crate Label, Mayflower Fruit Ass'n, Exeter California

Size: 13" x 4" each ~ little to no wear.

This one's a pair - two of these Mayflower crate labels come to you together.

A three-masted ship under golden sail on a deep blue sea, set in an oval at the end of a long black strip - and the name next to it is Mayflower. The packing house that used it was in Exeter, California, about as far from Plymouth Rock as you can get in this country. They knew exactly what they were doing with that name.

It reads Mayflower BRAND, California Fruits, PRODUCE OF U.S.A., GROWN AND PACKED BY MAYFLOWER FRUIT ASS'N., EXETER, CALIFORNIA, with the round BLUE ANCHOR - CALIFORNIA FRUIT EXCHANGE emblem, REG.U.S.PAT.OFFICE spelled out in tiny type at the lower left, and the printer's line SCHMIDT L. CO. FRESNO. in microtype at the lower right. Every one I have is unused and unmounted.

⛵ Mayflower, Puritan and Pilgrim

The Mayflower Fruit Association started in 1924 with a packing plant along the Southern Pacific right-of-way in Exeter, shipping grapes and other deciduous fruit. It filed for the MAYFLOWER trademark in August 1924, claiming first use on July 21, 1924, and got it registered on March 10, 1925, number 196131, for fresh grapes. The association kept that registration going in its own name all the way to a renewal in 1985. And it picked its brands to go with its name - Mayflower, Puritan and Pilgrim.

The label never says the ship is the Mayflower, but with that name beside it, it's hard to see anything else. The real one was an English square-rigged merchant ship that left Plymouth on September 16, 1620 with 102 passengers and a crew of about 25 or 30, sighted Cape Cod on November 19, and had the Mayflower Compact signed aboard two days later.

⚓ Blue Anchor, not Sunkist

That round anchor is the mark of the California Fruit Exchange, the Sacramento co-op that sold California's deciduous fruit - grapes, pears, plums, peaches - under the Blue Anchor name. It incorporated on May 1, 1901, first used the anchor in 1904 and registered it in 1923. People mix it up with the California Fruit Growers Exchange all the time, but that was the citrus outfit, and its mark was Sunkist. This label belongs to the Blue Anchor side and has no Sunkist on it anywhere.

🖨️ Schmidt of Fresno

Schmidt Lithograph took that name in 1907, when it replaced the old Mutual name, and it printed labels under a Fresno imprint - a 1919 Fresno County map already carries Schmidt Litho. Co. Fresno & S.F. In 1966 Schmidt merged with Stecher-Traung to become Stecher-Traung-Schmidt, so a label signed by Schmidt alone fits a printing before that merger.

📅 Dating it

Nothing on the sheet has a year. The brand can't be older than July 1924, and the Schmidt-only imprint fits before 1966. A crate-label dealer who's handled a Mayflower from this association calls it 1950s, which sits right in that window, though nobody has pinned it closer than that.

🏘️ Exeter

Exeter is a Tulare County town on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley. The railroad came through by 1888, and D. W. Parkhurst of the Southern Pacific named the place for Exeter, England. It incorporated in 1911 and grew up on fruit - grapes, stone fruit and oranges shipped out by rail under brands like this one.

⛵ About these

They're 13 by 4 inches, the long strip that went on the end of a grape lug. Frame one long and low over a doorway or a bar, pair it with other Exeter labels, or give it to somebody with Mayflower ancestors who'd get a kick out of the California branch of the family. The supply is finite - nobody's packing fruit under the Mayflower in Exeter again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.