Vintage Princess Crate Label 👸 from 1950s Louisiana

Who Packed Princess Brand Sweet Potatoes? 👸 Princess Brand Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potatoes

Size: 9" x 9" ~ Little to slight wear: some have a touch of corner softening or edge wear, and I'm being picky.

This one's different from most crate labels: the princess is a real photograph. A smiling young woman in a necklace, a real photograph with a sparkling tiara painted in on top, framed in a gold oval, next to a crate spilling over with sweet potatoes. This is a vintage 1950s Princess Brand Louisiana Porto Rican Sweet Potatoes crate label, packed by Sam Gothelf of Lafayette, Louisiana, and never used.

🔍 What's on it

PRINCESS runs across the top on a scalloped banner with BRAND under it. On the left, the photo portrait in an oval, with HAND SELECTED HAND PACKED beside it; on the right, Louisiana in script over PORTO RICAN SWEET POTATOES and a wooden crate draped with cloth, overflowing with sweet potatoes. Along the bottom, 50 LBS. NET WHEN PACKED, PACKED BY SAM GOTHELF, LAFAYETTE, LA. and a U.S. No 1 grade tag in the corner. Fifty pounds was the Louisiana standard sweet potato crate, the one the trade called the James crate. The back is plain, with the lettering showing faintly through.

🍠 The Porto Rico sweet potato

"Porto Rican" on the label is the variety, the Porto Rico sweet potato, the big one in Louisiana in those days. In 1934 Julian C. Miller at LSU found the Unit 1 Porto Rico, a desirable mutation of that popular variety, and according to his biography it "resulted in the development of a new agricultural industry in Louisiana." In 1937 he worked out how to get sweet potatoes, a tropical plant, to flower and set seed in Louisiana so new varieties could be bred, and in 1949 he helped start the Sweet Potato Research Station. Louisiana sold its moist, orange sweet potatoes as "yams," and next door in St. Landry Parish they threw the Yambilee festival for them from 1946 until 2012, queen's pageant and all.

Sam Gothelf packed sweet potatoes under more than one brand. I carry his Judy and Ilene labels too, and of those three, Princess is the one with the real photograph.

Sam Gothelf was a Chicago produce man, born there on Christmas Day 1908. The 1950 census still has him in Chicago as the proprietor of a wholesale produce company, and the Louisiana papers start mentioning him in 1951; his obituary says he lived in Lafayette 25 years before he retired, and he died in Houston in 1978. In December 1953 he shipped 2,604 crates of U.S. No. 1 and No. 2 yams to a buyer in Indianapolis who never paid, and it ended up as a federal produce case. That's what dates this label: it can't be older than his move to Lafayette around 1951. This same picture also turns up as a Queen label with a different woman in the oval, and that one carries the line of Walle & Co. of New Orleans, the old Mardi Gras poster lithographers, so Walle very likely printed this one too, though ours carries no printer's name.

He took to yam country, too. In 1954 he and two partners, Odon Leger and Dominic Culotta, started St. Landry Packing Co., Inc. over in Sunset. In 1957 the Yambilee in Opelousas named him Mr. Yam, which was meant to be a surprise until a Lafayette TV station let his name out before the release date, and in 1960 he went along on the Yambilee's goodwill tour to Chicago's South Water Market, the produce row where his brother still had a stall. Not bad for a Chicago boy.

Lafayette itself was Vermilionville until 1884, when it was renamed for General Lafayette.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That photo princess and the navy and red look great framed in a kitchen, and it's a perfect gift for anybody from Lafayette or Acadiana, or anybody who loves a sweet potato pie.

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 libraries keep whole collections of them, and more and more collectors are seeking them out to preserve their history.