Vintage 1960s Fireball Crate Label 🍑 South Carolina's Flaming Peach Comet

A Flaming Peach Comet? 🍑 Vintage 1960s Fireball Crate Label, Ridge Spring, South Carolina

9" x 3" ~

A 1960s Fireball crate label from the Ridge Peach & Vegetable Association, which packed out of Ridge Spring, Johnston, Trenton and Monetta, South Carolina

What a piece of Americana - a flaming peach shooting across the sky like a comet! Not the Fireball I knew growing up.🤪

🍑 Big red FIREBALL letters with yellow shadows ride the flame trail of a glowing peach streaking across a midnight-blue sky, with Brand tucked in at the end. Underneath it reads Produce of U.S.A., Ridge Peach & Vegetable Assn., Ridge Spring, Johnston, Trenton & Monetta, S.C. and Sales Office – Ridge Spring, S.C., next to a red-bordered shield promising Finest Eating Quality. It's cut in a gentle curve, the shape made to wrap around a round bushel basket, and down in the corner in tiny type is the printer: Louis Roesch Co., Litho. S.F. Calif. The back is plain.

🍑 The Ridge

Those four towns are the heart of the Ridge, the stretch of sloping hills across Aiken, Edgefield, Lexington and Saluda counties that grows most of South Carolina's peaches. Cotton was king there until the boll weevil wrecked it, and growers turned to peaches for a second income; peach farming around Ridge Spring got going in 1925. Asparagus had its run in the 1920s and '30s too, until competition from other states and bad weather squeezed it out and peach trees took its place. At its height the Ridge grew 85 percent of the state's crop, and it still grows about 60 percent, with more than 10,000 acres of orchards between Edgefield and Saluda counties.

Every town on this label has its own story. Ridge Spring shows up on maps as "The Ridge" as early as 1762; the "Spring" came in 1869, when the railroad built its depot and water tower by a natural spring whose rocky basin, the story goes, was carved by Native Americans. Johnston is named for William Johnston, president of the Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta Railroad, after Dr. Edward Jones Mims talked him into running the line through his 1,200-acre plantation in the late 1860s. George Washington himself stopped at the Lott family plantation nearby in 1791, and today the town sign calls Johnston the "Peach Capital of the World." Trenton held the first Ridge Peach Festival in 1971, put on by the Ridge Peach Growers Association, and it's still going. And Monetta sits where the old Cherokee Path met the Occaneechi Trail; local legend says the town is named for the beloved daughter of an Indian chief, and that she's buried right in the center of town.

🖨️ Printed in San Francisco

The label itself came all the way from California. Louis Roesch (1856–1916) came to America from Stuttgart in 1872 and started his San Francisco lithography firm in 1879, printing labels for crated, canned and bottled foods and for the Bay Area wineries. When the 1906 earthquake and fire wiped out the city north of Market Street, he was building again that same year, at Mission and 15th Streets, and Roesch Hall in the new building became a gathering place for San Francisco's German-American community. Louis Roesch Jr. ran the business until he died in 1959, the firm carried on for decades after, and the building came down in 2011. A South Carolina peach packer ordering its labels from a San Francisco lithographer tells you how far the Roesch name reached.

Crate labels come from a time that's gone, and to my eye nobody has matched that lithography since. Museums and art institutes give them whole galleries, and more collectors every year are hunting them down to keep that history alive. There's only so many of these left for sale - once they're on collectors' walls and in galleries, they'll be very difficult to acquire.

Picture this one on your own wall at home instead of behind museum glass!