Vintage 1970s Donner Brand Mountain Bartlett Pears Crate Label 🏔️ — Auburn Fruit Exchange, Auburn CA — Blue Anchor, Printed ZIP 95603

Who Packed Donner Brand Pears? 🏔️ Donner Brand Mountain Bartlett Pears, Auburn Fruit Exchange, Auburn, California

Size: 10 1/4" x 7 1/2" ~ Little to no wear.

What a view! This is a vintage 1970s Donner Brand pear crate label, packed by the Auburn Fruit Exchange of Auburn, California. The picture looks down a deep blue mountain lake between dark pine slopes, with snowy peaks glowing purple under a bright yellow sky, and in the foreground a graceful arched bridge curves across the snow. DONNER stands across the top in big beveled cream-and-gold letters with a red shadow, all on a solid black ground, and the Blue Anchor seal of the California Fruit Exchange sits in a yellow circle at the lower left.

The label never says where that view is, but with DONNER across the top I don't think it's much of a mystery. That sure looks like Donner Lake from the summit, with the Rainbow Bridge on old Highway 40 in the snow.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• DONNER BRAND
• CONTENTS 4/5 BUSHEL
• BLUE ANCHOR, CALIFORNIA FRUIT EXCHANGE ® (in the seal)
• UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• MOUNTAIN BARTLETT PEARS
• AUBURN FRUIT EXCHANGE
• AUBURN, CALIFORNIA 95603

That ZIP code tells you this printing is from 1963 or later, since five-digit ZIP codes only started on July 1, 1963. Collectors trace the Donner design itself back as far as the late 1920s and 1930s, and it stayed in use into the 1970s, with this ZIP version among the last.

❄️ Donner Pass and the Rainbow Bridge

Donner Pass sits at 7,056 feet in the northern Sierra Nevada, and it carries one of the most famous and saddest stories in the West. In the winter of 1846 the Donner Party, a wagon train of settlers bound for California, was trapped there by snow, and only 45 of the 81 made it out alive.

Eighty years later the road over the pass got its showpiece. Before the Rainbow Bridge, the old Lincoln or "Victory" Highway wound steeply down Donner Summit on grades as steep as 18 percent. The bridge and the last stretch of the new highway were finished in 1926, built on a compound curve with a grade, something that had never been done before, with gravel and sand mined right at Donner Lake. At the dedication that year, C.F. McGlashan gave a talk, and descendants of the Donner Party were there to see it. It's been one of the most photographed spots in the Sierra ever since. Down below, the lake sits at about 5,936 feet. The Union Pacific tracks run along Schallenberger Ridge on the south side, closely following the route of the original transcontinental railroad, and the old Lincoln Highway, the first automobile road across America, and US 40 follow the north shore and then climb to Donner Pass, where you can see the entire lake.

⛏️ Auburn and the Blue Anchor

Auburn is Gold Rush country. A young French miner named Claude Chana found gold there on May 16, 1848, and the camp went from North Fork Dry Diggings to Wood's Dry Diggings before miners from Auburn, New York named it Auburn in August 1849. It became the seat of Placer County in 1851, and the Central Pacific, the western leg of the first transcontinental railroad, reached town in 1865. Later the foothills around Auburn, Newcastle and Loomis turned into serious fruit country, and the first carload of fresh California fruit ever shipped east left Newcastle for Chicago around 1879.

The Blue Anchor on this label belongs to the California Fruit Exchange, the growers' cooperative that incorporated on May 1, 1901 with member associations from Loomis, Newcastle and Penryn, just down the road from Auburn. Founding member George H. Cutter suggested the anchor as early as 1903, it went into use in 1904, and by 1923 it was a registered trademark reserved for the Exchange's best fruit.

🏡 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.

Old stock like this doesn't come back. Once the supply for sale is gone and these labels are framed in homes and galleries, they will be very hard to get.

Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum! It's a natural for a cabin or a ski house, and a perfect gift for anybody from Auburn, Truckee or Placer County, or anybody who has driven over Donner Summit.