Vintage 1978 Bloomfield Farms Firewood Crate Label 🪵 Cowboy Cabin Snow Scene Santa Clara Valley California Advertising Ephemera

Who Sold Bloomfield Farms Firewood? 🤠 Bloomfield Farms Genuine Firewood, Santa Clara Valley, California, © 1978

Size: 11 3/4" x 7 1/2" ~ Little to no wear.

A cowboy in a plaid coat riding home through the falling snow at dusk, his horse high-stepping toward a log cabin with warm yellow light in the windows and smoke curling from the chimney, while a dog races out across the snow to meet him. Doesn't that just make you want to put another log on the fire? This is a vintage 1978 Bloomfield Farms Genuine Firewood label for a box of split oak and madrone logs from the Santa Clara Valley, California, and it was never put on a box.

🔍 What's on it

GENUINE in small spaced letters over a big FIREWOOD in orange-to-gold letters, with a ribbon reading SPLIT OAK & MADRONE LOGS. Below, the whole painted winter scene: the rider on a buckskin horse, snowy pines and fence rails, the glowing cabin, a woman at the door, a boy and the dog running down the hill, and snowflakes falling against a deep blue sky. In the corner, 1.15 CUBIC FEET, and at the lower right a cream oval with BLOOMFIELD FARMS over a little farmhouse and rows of crops, ringed with SANTA CLARA VALLEY SINCE 1853. There's a faint painter's signature beside the oval, and along the bottom ©1978 Bloomfield Farms, California 95020, all inside a blue border with a yellow rule. The back is plain.

🧄 Gilroy and the Santa Clara Valley

That 95020 ZIP code is Gilroy, down at the south end of the Santa Clara Valley. Gilroy is named for John Gilroy, born John Cameron in Inverness-shire, Scotland in 1794, who came ashore at the Spanish harbor of Monterey in 1814 as a young sailor and stayed. The town was incorporated in 1868, and the first school building in town went up in 1853, the same year this label's Since 1853 points back to. Today Gilroy is famous for garlic, and every summer the Gilroy Garlic Festival draws thousands of fans of "the stinking rose."

Bloomfield is one of the grand old names around Gilroy, too. Henry Miller, the Cattle King, who landed in San Francisco in 1850 with six dollars to his name and built Miller & Lux into one of the largest landowners in the United States, built his beloved Bloomfield Ranch just south of Gilroy as his headquarters, with a summer home up in what is now Mount Madonna Park, where the ruins can still be seen. He was born Heinrich Albrecht Kreiser in Brackenheim, in Germany's Wurttemberg, in 1827, worked as a butcher in New York, and came to California in 1850 as Henry Miller, a name he borrowed from a non-transferable steamer ticket. He went into partnership with Charles Lux in 1858, and by the end Miller & Lux owned about 1.4 million acres outright and controlled nearly 22,000 square miles of cattle and farm land in California, Nevada and Oregon. He died on October 14, 1916. In the late 1850s he bought up much of the old Rancho Las Animas, and Bloomfield, down near where Highways 101 and 25 meet, became the feeder lot where his herds rested on the drive from the Central Valley to the San Francisco market. It had its own general store, a blacksmith shop and its own railroad shipping station, and a family mansion of more than forty rooms built in 1888 that burned in 1923. The three concrete silos he had built at Bloomfield in 1911 still stand as landmarks along Highway 101, and his big red hay barn, raised in 1891 for the cattle and horses and later used for processing the stone fruit grown on his land, has been saved as the Miller Red Barn at Christmas Hill Park. It went on the National Register of Historic Places on September 26, 2016.

🔥 Firewood by the box

And the painter? Collectors of Bloomfield Farms labels have long credited these Western scenes to Bruce Wolfe of Piedmont, the Bay Area illustrator who had been an art director at Foote, Cone & Belding before going out on his own around 1971 to paint for Levi's, Gallo and Henry Weinhard, and who later became, in the San Francisco Chronicle's words, "the top sculptor for hire in the Bay Area, and maybe the nation," with Tony Bennett, Clint Eastwood and Gavin Newsom among the people he cast in bronze. He was born March 29, 1941, settled in Piedmont in 1967, and died December 27, 2022. The signature by the oval is too faint to read, so I'll tell it the way it's told to me, as the story that goes with these labels. By the late 1970s a box of firewood with a pretty label on it was a real thing to sell, and Bloomfield Farms did it with style: this cowboy scene, and another with a family around a cabin fireplace. It's the kind of Old West, home-by-the-fire picture that sold a cozy evening before you ever struck the match.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! It looks great framed by a fireplace, in a cabin, a den or a man cave, and it's a perfect gift for a cowboy, a horse lover, or anybody from Gilroy and the Santa Clara Valley.

Labels like this are a reminder of a bygone era, and the printing and artwork on them are something special even to this day, in my opinion. Museums and art institutes have galleries dedicated to them, and more and more collectors are seeking them out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to acquire.