Vintage 1960s Old Mission Crate Label from California

Why Are Post-War Crate Labels So Much Harder to Find? 🌉

Most crate label collections skew heavily toward the pre-war decades, and there's a real historical reason for that — which makes a genuine 1960s example like this one a bit of an outlier worth understanding.

🌉 What It Is

This is an original New Old Stock (NOS) citrus crate label, Old Mission brand, produced by the Redbanks Packing Company of Redbanks and Woodlake, California, dating to the 1960s. It measures a generous 12 x 4 inches and depicts an illustrated California mission tower with red tile roofing, crosses, and a golden ribbon banner, in the warm, romantic palette that citrus packers across the state favored for generations. The label survives unused, exactly as it left the printer.

🍊 Redbanks Packing Company and the Decline of the Crate Label

Redbanks and Woodlake sit in California's Central Valley citrus belt, an agricultural region that shipped fruit nationally throughout the twentieth century. The Old Mission brand drew on the same romantic, Spanish-colonial mission imagery that Southern and Central California packers used widely to evoke old California heritage — bell towers, red tile roofs, and sun-warmed adobe, selling an entire regional mood alongside the fruit itself.

What makes a label like this genuinely less common than its pre-war counterparts is a real shift in the packing industry: paper crate labels were the dominant form of citrus and produce branding through the 1930s, but wartime paper rationing and, more permanently, the industry's postwar shift toward pre-printed cardboard cartons dramatically reduced the need for individual paper labels glued onto wooden crates. By the 1960s, a company still producing a traditional lithographed paper label — rather than a printed carton — was continuing an older practice that most of the industry had already left behind, which is part of why surviving examples from this later period turn up less often than their 1930s and 1940s counterparts.

🖨️ The Printing

The label was produced by color lithography, using the mission-tower-and-ribbon composition that became a recognizable visual shorthand across California's Old Mission-branded produce lines throughout the mid-twentieth century.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• ⛪ Frame it for a Spanish colonial, mission-revival, or California-themed room — the elongated format suits a mantel or long wall run beautifully.
• 🍊 Group it with other California citrus crate labels for a regional agricultural history display.
• 📚 Pair it with mission-era California history ephemera for a themed collection.

🎁 Who Collects These

California citrus label collectors, Central Valley regional historians, and mission-revival decor enthusiasts all seek out labels like this one — genuine 1960s examples add a later chapter to a collecting category that skews heavily toward the prewar decades.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Why are 1960s crate labels less common?

The industry shifted toward pre-printed cardboard cartons after WWII, phasing out individual paper labels glued to wooden crates. A company still using traditional lithography this late is a genuine holdover from an earlier practice.

What size is this label?

12 x 4 inches.

Where was it produced?

By the Redbanks Packing Company, serving the Redbanks and Woodlake, California growing region.