Vintage 1960s Old Mission Citrus Crate Label 🍊 — Redbanks Packing Co, Woodlake CA — Mission Bell Tower Art

🍊 A Small Packer's Label From the End of the Wooden Crate

This one comes from a modest, little-remembered corner of California's citrus country — and from the very last years of the crate-label age. It is an original Old Mission citrus crate label of the Redbanks Packing Co., of Redbanks and Woodlake, in Tulare County, California. It survives unused and intact, and everything here is drawn from the label in the photographs and from what the record actually preserves about this small packer; where that record runs thin, this copy says so honestly rather than inventing.

🏷️ Who Redbanks Packing Co. Was

Redbanks is a small place in the Central Valley citrus belt, just west of Woodlake, east of Visalia, in the orange country of Tulare County — and its agricultural roots run deep: orchards were being planted around Redbanks as early as 1894, on the warm ground sheltered by the Sierra foothills. Out of that district came the Redbanks Packing Co. (also seen as Redbanks Fruit Co.), a grower-and-packer operation that shipped its fruit under the "Old Mission" brand. The label gives its own precise address — 34825 Road 192, Woodlake, California — the kind of plain, specific detail that pins a real business to a real spot on the map. The Old Mission brand rode on more than one Redbanks product over the years, appearing on the house's citrus and on its table grapes. Beyond that, honestly, the detailed corporate history of this particular packer is thin; it was one of the many small, workaday Central Valley fruit houses whose clearest surviving trace today is the labels it left behind. That, in its own way, is the story: an ordinary local packer, remembered chiefly by a beautiful piece of paper.

🔔 What the Label Shows

This is a long, narrow strip label — the horizontal end-label format — and it uses that shape beautifully. Against a deep, rich burgundy ground, the brand blazes across the sheet: "OLD" in a small red, tilted block, and "Mission" sweeping the full width in tall, elegant golden-yellow script, with a small "BRAND" tucked beneath. At the left end sits the picture that names it: a California mission church in warm color — a tall bell tower crowned with a cross and pierced by arched belfry openings, a domed roofline, red-tiled roofs, an arched entry, feathery palms and greenery, all under a sky of glowing clouds — with a single golden ribbon swooping across to tie picture to lettering. Along the top the sheet reads "PRODUCT OF U.S.A.," and beneath the brand it names its maker: "Packed by REDBANKS PACKING CO., Redbanks, California," with the Woodlake address and the small "Reg. U.S. Pat. Office" of a registered brand.

⛪ The Mission Mood — and an Honest Note on the Picture

The imagery is doing what generations of California citrus packers asked of it. Bell towers, red tile, sun-warmed adobe and mission crosses were the visual language the whole industry used to wrap its fruit in the romance of "old California" — and a small Tulare County house like Redbanks reached for the same mood the big Southern California brands did. An "Old Mission" orange was sold as a little parcel of California heritage and sunshine. In fairness to you, the mission on the label is painted as a romantic archetype rather than a documented, named building, so it is best enjoyed for the feeling it conjures, not read as a portrait of one specific church. (The "Old Mission" name, it's worth noting, was used by more than one California packer over the years; this one is specifically Redbanks' own registered version.)

🕰️ Why a 1960s Label Is Worth Noticing

Here is the quiet significance of the date, and it's a real one. Paper crate labels were the dominant form of citrus branding from the 1880s through the 1930s and '40s — but the wooden crate they were made for was living on borrowed time, and the industry's shift to pre-printed cardboard cartons around 1956 brought the medium to an end. By the 1960s the great age of the crate label was effectively over, and far fewer new labels were being printed. That places a Redbanks Old Mission sheet in the final chapter of the story: a late label, from a small packer, in a dying format. Post-war examples like this are genuinely less common in collections than their pre-war cousins. (That era arc is the seasoning; the spine is this one small Woodlake house.)

📦 Genuine, Unused New Old Stock

This is an original period label in New Old Stock condition — printed to be pasted on a Redbanks citrus crate and never used, just as it left the printer. The reverse, shown in the photographs, is clean blank stock, the sign of a label stored flat and never applied to a box. It measures a generous 12 by 4 inches — a long, dramatic horizontal strip that frames strikingly. The color is deep and bright, the image whole and clear. It is offered precisely as pictured, with nothing retouched or concealed.

🖼️ How to Live With It

• 🍊 Frame it as vintage graphic art — that long, narrow strip shape is a designer's dream over a doorway, a shelf or a stretch of kitchen wall.
• ⛪ Let it carry a Spanish-Revival, Mission-style or Southwestern room; the bell tower and red tile do the work in one glance.
• 🖼️ Group it with other California citrus labels for a gallery wall — its horizontal format plays beautifully against the squarer sheets.
• 🍊 Set it in a Woodlake, Tulare County or Central Valley home as a piece of genuine local citrus history.
• 🎁 Give it, matted and framed, to a lover of California missions, citrus history or vintage graphic design.

💛 Who It Is For

This suits the crate-label collector filling out the harder-to-find post-war and strip-format corners of the hobby; the decorator who wants a long, dramatic horizontal piece of vintage color; the Central Valley or Tulare County local proud of the citrus heritage; and the admirer of California mission imagery who simply loves the picture. There is only this single sheet, an individual original, offered as shown.

❓ A Few Honest Answers

Who made it?

The Redbanks Packing Co., a grower-packer at Redbanks and Woodlake, California (address 34825 Road 192, Woodlake), in the Tulare County citrus belt.

Is it original?

Yes — an original 1960s lithographed citrus crate label in unused New Old Stock condition, with a clean blank back.

Is that a real named mission?

No — the mission is a romantic archetype of the California mission church, not a documented, named building. Enjoy it for the mood.

How big is it?

Approximately 12 by 4 inches — a long, narrow horizontal strip label.

Was it ever used?

No — the blank reverse shows it was never pasted to a crate.

🍊 Woodlake and the Tulare County Citrus Belt

The ground behind this label is real orange country. Woodlake sits in Tulare County, in the Central Valley citrus belt that runs along the Sierra foothills east of Visalia — a stretch of warm days, cool nights and foothill drainage that made it one of California's great orange-growing regions, and still one today. Redbanks itself, the little locality the packer took its name from, had orchards going in as early as 1894, well before the town of Woodlake had fully taken shape around it. Into the twentieth century the belt shipped its fruit to the whole nation, some through the big cooperative exchanges and some through independent grower-packers like this one. Redbanks Packing Co. was one of those smaller, local houses, working out of the address printed right on the label. That's the honest scale of it: not a famous name, but a genuine Tulare County fruit house sending its oranges east under a warm, mission-crowned brand — a small, real thread in the fabric of California citrus.

🍊 What It Shipped, and How It Was Sold

Redbanks was a grower-packer, meaning it both raised fruit and boxed it, and the Old Mission brand rode on more than one of its products — its oranges and citrus, and its table grapes as well. That range is a small window into how a Central Valley fruit house actually worked: a single brand and a single mission picture, stamped on whatever the season sent to market, competing for a buyer's eye against dozens of other brands stacked on the same terminal floor. The choice to reach for a golden mission — the imagery of the big, famous Southern California citrus houses — tells you a modest Tulare County packer knew exactly what sold: not just fruit, but the warm idea of California itself. This label is that strategy, preserved intact.

✨ Why It Matters

This is a small piece of California from the moment its most beautiful sales tool was quietly retiring — the actual brand of a small Woodlake packer whose clearest memorial is the paper it left behind. Preserved unused, its back still blank, a golden mission tower on deep burgundy in the long strip format, it comes from the crate label's final chapter and is scarcer than the pre-war sheets that fill most collections. Frame it and you keep the last, warm echo of an ordinary Central Valley fruit house and an American art form. There is only the one.