Vintage 1940s Nuchief Pears Crate Label 🍐 from Washington

Who Packed Nuchief Pears? 🍐 Nuchief Brand Washington Pears, Washington Sales, Inc.

Size: 10 1/2" x 7 1/2" ~ Little to slight wear: some have a touch of corner softening you'd hardly notice.

Two fat golden pears and one of the best scripts on any label I carry. That big Nuchief, outlined in bands of white, yellow, orange, red and brown, just glows on the dark ground. This is a vintage 1940s Nuchief Brand Washington Pears crate label, distributed by Washington Sales, Inc., a grower co-operative of Wenatchee, Washington, printed by the Schmidt Lithograph Co. in Seattle, and never pasted on a box.

🔍 What's on it

Nuchief in huge flowing script across the top, with a small light-blue BRAND and REG. U. S. PAT. OFF. at the end. On the left, WASHINGTON PEARS in big white letters. At the lower right, two realistic golden-orange pears with green leaves, hanging from a cut stem, on a plain dark gray ground. At the lower left, in light blue, DISTRIBUTED BY WASHINGTON SALES, Inc., A GROWER CO-OPERATIVE, WENATCHEE, WASHINGTON and PRODUCE OF U.S.A., and in small type, the printer, SCHMIDT L. CO. SEATTLE. The back is plain, with the lettering showing faintly through.

🌄 Wenatchee pears

Wenatchee sits where the Wenatchee River meets the Columbia, and it takes its name from the Wenatchi people. The first apple trees went in there in 1872, the Great Northern came over Stevens Pass in 1893, and by 1902 the town was calling itself the "Apple Capital of the World." Pears grew right alongside the apples, and in 1931 the growers of Oregon and Washington formed the Oregon-Washington Pear Bureau to advertise their pears, today's Pear Bureau Northwest. Labels like this went on the ends of wooden fruit boxes from the early 1900s until the cardboard box took over in the late 1950s. The Nuchief name is still around, too: there's a Nuchief Sales, Inc. in Wenatchee today.

🖨️ Schmidt Lithograph

Max Schmidt was born in Germany in 1850, went to sea as a cabin boy at 14, and landed in San Francisco in 1871. By 1876 he had his own company printing stock certificates and colored labels by stone lithography, and in 1883 it became the Schmidt Label & Lithographic Company. He was burned out in 1884 and 1886 and again in the 1906 earthquake and fire, rebuilt every time, and grew into one of the most successful lithography businesses in the country, with plants along the whole West Coast, including this Seattle one. Schmidt died in 1936, and the firm carried on until 1994.

Oops, it looks like I photographed two of them at once! Some have very slight corner softening I didn't notice when taking pictures, so you would never notice it on display, but please see the pictures and video and judge for yourself.

Washington State University's special collections hold Nuchief labels from Wenatchee too. Schmidt's firm took the name Schmidt Lithograph Company when its new San Francisco building opened in 1907, kept it for six decades, and was bought by Stecher-Traung in 1966.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That glowing script and those golden pears look great framed in a kitchen, and it's a perfect gift for anybody from Wenatchee or the Washington fruit country.

Crate labels are a reminder of a bygone era, and the lithography on them 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 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.