Vintage 1970s Big Stump Grapes Crate Label 🍇 Woodlake, CA, American Icon

Why Big Stump? 🍇 Vintage 1970s Grapes Crate Label, Woodlake, CA

Size: 12 1/2" x 4" ~ little to no wear.

🌲 A man and a woman standing on top of a giant sawn-off tree stump, so big it's like a stage, with the sequoias towering all around them and the light coming down through the trunks. It's a Big Stump grape label from the Sequoia Foothill Fruit Growers of Woodlake, California, never used, and the deep navy with that bright blue lettering really pops on a wall.

🔍 What's On It

The picture runs down the left: the huge stump with its bark and roots, a few ferns, the two little figures on top and the big trees behind. On the navy field at the right it reads Big Stump BRAND in big pale blue letters, GRAPES in a box, then SEQUOIA FOOTHILL FRUIT GROWERS, WOODLAKE, CALIF. 93286, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and PRODUCE OF U. S. A., with REG. U. S. PAT. OFF. up in the corner. There's a tiny printer's line along the bottom edge too small to read, ending in S. F. CALIF., a San Francisco lithographer.

That ZIP code dates it. Five-digit ZIP codes started in July 1963, so this printing is 1963 or later, and the label trade puts this exact version in the 1970s. Big Stump was printed in other versions too, including ones with no ZIP code and a blank box for the packer to stamp in the fruit.

🍇 The Sequoia Foothill Fruit Growers

The Sequoia Foothill Fruit Growers were a growers' cooperative in Tulare County, in the Sierra foothills east of Visalia. They registered Big Stump as a trademark for fresh grapes in 1929, saying they'd been using it since November 6, 1928, and they renewed it right through 1969. A 1937 University of California list of farm co-ops has them down for deciduous fruit. They had other brands too: Foothill Maid, a 7-11 label with a pair of dice, Giant Tree, and Montana, and they shipped oranges under Foothill Maid through the California Fruit Exchange's Blue Anchor. A bit of the co-op is filed away for good: UC Davis keeps its Montana label in the Lug and Can Label Collection, and the Pfau Library at Cal State San Bernardino has two copies of its Foothill Maid orange label.

Woodlake itself is a little Tulare County town at the edge of the foothills. Gilbert F. Stevenson laid out the townsite around 1908 to 1912, depending on who you ask, and it incorporated in 1941.

🌲 The Real Big Stumps

The label never says which stump it is, but there's a real Big Stump Grove right up the road, at the southwest entrance of Kings Canyon National Park. It's a grove of giant sequoia stumps. The Mark Twain Tree, one of the biggest sequoias in the world, came down there in 1891, and sections of it went to natural history museums in New York and London. And here's the part I love for a grape label: the rest of that giant tree was cut up into grape stakes and fence posts. The grove takes its name from Old Adam, a huge standing sequoia snag, and the stumps are still out there in the trees, big enough to stand on, just like the couple on this label.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1970s Big Stump Brand Grapes crate label, Sequoia Foothill Fruit Growers, Woodlake, Calif. 93286
• Couple standing on a giant sequoia stump in a redwood grove, navy and bright blue
• About 12 1/2" x 4", little to no wear, unused, New Old Stock
• You'll get one label like the ones shown

🖼️ It's a long, skinny label, perfect over a kitchen window or a doorway, and a great one for anybody who's been up into the big trees.