Vintage 1960s-1970s Red Wagon Fruit Crate Label 🍇 Reedley California Grape Label, Royal Valley Fruit Growers

Why Is Reedley Called the World's Fruit Basket? 🍇 A Vintage 1960s-1970s Red Wagon Brand Fruit Crate Label, Royal Valley Fruit Growers, Reedley, California

Size: 13" x 4"

A grinning boy in a striped shirt and green shorts, neckerchief flying, coasting along in a red wagon loaded with bunches of purple and green grapes - with RED WAGON in big red letters on a cream band across a magenta ground. The small print reads UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, REG. U.S. PAT. OFF, BRAND, ROYAL VALLEY FRUIT GROWERS ASS'N., REEDLEY, CALIFORNIA. It's unused - never pasted on a crate.

📅 What that REG. U.S. PAT. OFF tells you

That little registration notice up in the corner dates the label. The Patent Office's own record shows the Royal Valley Fruit Growers Association filed RED WAGON for fresh fruits on June 10, 1968, and it was registered on December 3, 1968, registration number 861,466. A label can only carry REG. U.S. PAT. OFF once the mark is registered, so this printing came out after December 1968 - the late 1960s or the 1970s. The registration ran until it lapsed, and was finally marked expired in 1992.

🍇 Royal Valley Fruit Growers

The association packed fruit in Reedley under several brands - RED WAGON, POLAR BIRD with its penguin, ROYAL MOUNTAIN, ROYAL VALLEY and LAC JAC are all on its trademark list, and its own sworn filing for POLAR BIRD says that brand was first used on July 20, 1961, so the association was at work by then. A grape grower's label like this went on the end of the shipping crate so a buyer back East could pick the brand out of a car full of fruit.

🌳 Reedley, the World's Fruit Basket

Reedley, in the San Joaquin Valley southeast of Fresno, is named for Thomas Law Reed, a Civil War veteran who gave half his land to the township in 1888. In the early 1880s local ranchers pooled their money to bring Kings River water in by canal, and that water turned wheat country into grapes, figs and peaches. German Mennonite families came from Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Canada to farm it, and by 1909 the town already had two Mennonite churches. Reedley incorporated on February 18, 1913, and it still calls itself the World's Fruit Basket; the Reedley Museum keeps old wooden fruit crates, labels and all, on display.

🍇 About these labels

Every one I have is unused, 13 by 4 inches - a long one that looks great over a kitchen window, in a farmhouse kitchen, or with other California crate labels, and a natural for anybody from Reedley or Fresno County. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Red Wagon labels anymore, and once these last unused ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.