Vintage 1970s Beaver Brand Cherries / Cerises Crate Label 🍒 — Bilingual, Tenneco West, Bakersfield CA

Who Packed Beaver Brand Cherries? 🍒 Beaver Brand Cherries / Cerises, Tenneco West, Bakersfield, California

Size: 9 1/2" x 2 3/4" ~ Little to no wear.

Bright and beautiful! This is a vintage 1970s Beaver Brand cherry label, distributed by Tenneco West of Bakersfield, California. It's a long, skinny box-end label on a deep royal blue: BEAVER on an orange-gold ribbon at one end and CHERRIES on another at the other, big glossy red cherries with green leaves on both sides, and right in the middle a little window where a brown beaver is hard at work on a gnawed tree at the edge of a woodland stream.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• BEAVER® BRAND / MARQUE
• CHERRIES / CERISES
• Produce of U.S.A. / Produit des É.-U.
• Net Wt 18 lb / Poids Net 8.16 kg
• Distributed By / Distribuè Par Tenneco West, Bakersfield, California 93389
• TENNECO® (in its shield)

Everything on it is printed twice, once in English and once in French, and the weight is in pounds and kilograms. That's a box headed for Canada. Canada's Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act passed at the start of the 1970s, prepackaged food there has had to show its weight in metric since 1976, and Quebec's language charter of 1977 put French on product labels. Look close at "Distribuè Par," too: the accent is printed backwards. It should be an acute, é, and somebody set a grave, è. I love a little printer's slip like that.

🌰 Tenneco West and the Kern County Land Company

Tenneco West grew out of one of the biggest land companies in California history. The Kern County Land Company was organized in 1890 by the financier James Ben Ali Haggin and his brother-in-law Lloyd Tevis, who with William Carr had used the Desert Land Act to put together some 300,000 acres in Kern County. They dug a network of irrigation canals, 27 of them at the peak, and grew cotton and other field crops, fed cattle, and pumped oil out from under their own land. In August 1967 the Tenneco company, the old Tennessee Gas, bought Kern County Land for about $430 million and ran the California side as Tenneco West.

Tenneco West's trademark file shows how much it grew and sold: TastySweet strawberries, Sun Diet citrus, raisins, Mel-Pak and Sun Supreme table grapes, Landco potatoes, Big Red! pistachios and Freshsal almonds, and the Sun Giant line of nuts, dates and dried fruit, "There's something good under the sun... Sun Giant." Even the ZIP on this label has a local story. 93389 is a Bakersfield post office box ZIP along Stockdale Highway, and the Stockdale neighborhood got its start with Lloyd Tevis himself.

In the late 1980s Tenneco refocused on its other businesses, and in 1987 Castle & Cooke, the company that already owned Dole and renamed itself Dole Food Company in 1991, bought most of Tenneco West's farming operations. Castle & Cooke later built homes on parts of the old land in southwest Bakersfield.

🦫 Why a Beaver?

Tenneco West wasn't the only one to use the name. Victor Fruit Growers, from Victor near Lodi, packed under a Beaver label too, with a beaver felling a tree at the water's edge. The busy beaver has always been a good sell: hard-working, careful and always building. And a beaver on a box bound for Canada, where the beaver is the national animal, doesn't hurt one bit.

🏡 Display

Crate Labels are a reminder of a bygone era but the amazing lithography process is unparalleled even to this day in my opinion. Museums and Art Institutes have galleries dedicated to them and more and more collectors are seeking these out to preserve their history.

Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum! The long shape fits right over a kitchen doorway, and it's a fun gift for a cherry lover, a Canadian, or anybody from Bakersfield and Kern County.