Vintage 1940s - 1950s Pinto Crate Label 🤠 Castroville California Vegetables, Monterey Bay Pkg. Co. — Stecher-Traung Litho, Cowboy & Lasso Art

Pinto Brand California Vegetables Crate Label 🤠 Monterey Bay Pkg. Co., Castroville, California

Size: 9" x 7"

This one comes at you at a full gallop - a grinning cowboy swinging his lasso from a pinto horse, all on jet black, with PINTO across the top and California Vegetables underneath. Growers, packers & shippers, Monterey Bay Pkg. Co., Castroville, Calif., Finest Quality, Produce of U.S.A., and down in the corner, Stecher-Traung, S.F. Never pasted on a crate. I have a stack of these, so yours will look just like this one.

🐎 A Painted Horse

Pinto comes from the Spanish for painted - a horse splashed with white patches like this one. A label historian writing for the Ephemera Society describes a Pinto vegetable label lithographed by Stecher-Traung of San Francisco and calls its rider a vaquero, the Mexican cowboy of the old Southwest. Monterey Bay ran a whole corral of Western brands - a Bronco Buster rodeo rider and a Bronco on its artichoke labels - and a Snow Slide skier too.

🌿 Castroville, the Artichoke Center of the World

Juan Bautista Castro founded Castroville in 1863, at the edge of Monterey Bay where the lower Salinas Valley meets the sea. In 1922 Andrew Molera planted the first artichoke shoots there, and within a few years more than fifty growers had 12,000 acres in, most of them in and around Castroville - it's still the Artichoke Center of the World and still throws an Artichoke Festival. And here's the one everybody in town loves to tell: in February 1948, a young actress named Marilyn Monroe came through the Monterey Bay area, and the California Artichoke Association put a sash on her as California's Artichoke Queen.

🔎 Dating It

Nothing on it carries a year, but the printer narrows it. Stecher-Traung took that name in 1936, when San Francisco's Traung Label & Lithograph took in the Stecher Lithograph Company of Rochester, and used it until 1966. Dealers split between the 1940s and the 1950s for this label, and paper crate labels were on their way out by the end of the '50s, so that's where it sits.

A great one framed in a kitchen, a den or anywhere that needs a cowboy.