Vintage 1950s Challenger Crate Label 🤠 California Vegetables, Western Packing Co, Salinas, Guadalupe, El Centro CA

Where Was Western Packing Company's Main Office? 🤠 Challenger Brand Crate Label, California Vegetables - Western Packing Company, Salinas, Guadalupe & El Centro

Size: 10" x 7"

A red cowboy getting thrown clean back in the saddle - hat flying, bronco bucking - in a cream circle on deep blue, with CHALLENGER across the top and California VEGETABLES in yellow underneath. The black band at the bottom reads Western Packing Company, packers and shippers, with MAIN OFFICE sitting right over GUADALUPE, CALIFORNIA - the one town that gets its state name - and Salinas and El Centro on either side. Vegetable labels were often printed taller than wide like this, to be pasted on the end of a stackable wooden crate, and in metric this one runs about 25.4 x 17.8 cm. Never pasted on a crate. Yours will look just like this one.

🥬 Western Packing Company

Western Packing shipped artichokes, celery, lettuce, broccoli, endive and cabbage to markets all over the United States and Canada, and it ran a whole stable of cowboy brands - this Challenger, a Mustang, a Hot Brand and a Big Western among them. The Boston Public Library keeps two of its labels in its collection: the Hot Brand, which its catalogers put in the 1940s, and the Mustang, dated to the 1950s and printed by the Louis Roesch Company of San Francisco. Those two name Guadalupe alone. This Challenger names three towns, and dealers explain that as the company following the growing season up and down the state.

🗺️ Three Towns

Salinas, near the mouth of the Salinas Valley, is the "Salad Bowl of the World" - folks there tell of rail yards running produce cars practically around the clock at harvest - and John Steinbeck's hometown - he was born there in 1902. Guadalupe is a little farm town in the Santa Maria Valley of Santa Barbara County, next to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, where Cecil B. DeMille built the giant Egyptian city for his 1923 The Ten Commandments and then left it buried in the sand - so no rival studio could use it, the old-timers say. For decades it passed for a tall tale around town, until archaeologists went digging and started pulling pieces of that lost city back out of the dunes. The set had 21 plaster sphinxes, and in 2017 a dig run by the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center lifted out a 300-pound sphinx head in such good shape that the 1923 crew's fingerprints were still on it. And El Centro, way down in the Imperial Valley near the Mexican border, sits about 50 feet below sea level - the largest city in the country below sea level - and grows the country's winter vegetables when the coast is too cold. That valley is desert, with about three inches of rain a year, and it farms on Colorado River water brought in by canal: the first water came through the Alamo Canal in 1901, and by 1942 the All-American Canal was carrying all of it. Put the three together and you can see how a vegetable shipper kept lettuce on the trains most of the year.

🔎 Dating It

Nothing on it carries a year. The little copyright mark with the company's name and no date is the short form the 1909 Copyright Act allowed for prints, which fits the years before 1978 but doesn't pin it down, and paper crate labels stayed in use until the 1950s, when printed cardboard boxes took over. Most dealers put this design in the 1950s, and so do I.

Old-timers in the crate label world will tell you that a town's name on a label like this is often the only public record a packing company left behind - no photographs, no papers, just the label.

Fantastic framed in a kitchen, a den or anywhere that needs a bucking bronco. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Challenger crate labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.