Vintage 1940s Royal Knight Sunkist Citrus Crate Label 🍊 — Redlands Co-operative Fruit Association, Redlands CA — Knight & Castle

Who Packed Royal Knight Citrus in Redlands? 🛡️ Royal Knight, Redlands Co-operative Fruit Association, Redlands, California

Size: 11" x 10" ~ Little to no wear.

Every orange deserves a knight in shining armor! This is a vintage early 1940s Royal Knight crate label, packed by the Redlands Co-operative Fruit Association out of Redlands, California. A knight in full silver plate armor sits tall on a big chestnut horse, visor up and lance lowered, with a red pennant fluttering off the tip. Behind him a cream stone castle with red-roofed towers stands on a green hill, and past it the valley runs out in rows of groves and plowed fields to blue mountains, all under a blazing yellow and orange sky. Down in the corner, glowing in the dark rocks below the horse, sits a big orange peeking out of its tissue wrapper with Sunkist written right across its face.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• ROYAL KNIGHT
• GROWN IN U.S.A.
• Sunkist (on the wrapped orange)
• T. M. REG. U. S. PAT. OFFICE © 1926
• REDLANDS CO-OPERATIVE FRUIT ASSOCIATION
• REDLANDS, CALIFORNIA

You won't find a printer's name anywhere on it, and it never actually says oranges in type. It doesn't need to. That wrapped Sunkist orange tells you exactly what was in the box and how good it was. Sunkist was the name the California Fruit Growers Exchange took up in 1907 for its growers' fruit, and the Sunkist wrapper marked the Exchange's top grade. The Exchange itself changed its name to Sunkist Growers in 1952.

🐴 The Knight Has Been Riding Since 1926

Look close under the orange and you'll find a tiny line in red: T. M. REG. U. S. PAT. OFFICE © 1926. That year is no accident. ROYAL KNIGHT was a registered trademark. The application went into the U.S. Patent Office on April 7, 1926, and it was registered on December 21, 1926, as No. 221,982, for fresh citrus fruits, namely oranges and grapefruit. So the knight himself goes back to 1926, and this printing is one I date to the early 1940s.

Here's the part I love. That registration stayed on the books for more than eighty years, and when it finally expired in 2007 the owner on file was William Thomas Hardy Jr. of Redlands, Bill Hardy, and the Hardys are about as Redlands citrus as a family gets. Bill's grandfather Clarence Hardy came to town in 1910 and taught industrial arts at Redlands High School for over forty years. His father, William Thomas Hardy, was born in Redlands in 1919, went to work for Mutual Orange Distributors in 1946, and starting in 1963 managed Redlands Foothill Groves for eighteen years. Back in the '60s and '70s he opened up markets for Redlands oranges in Hong Kong, Japan and the rest of Asia, and when he passed in 2004 his obituary credited him with the survival of Foothill Groves, by then the only citrus packing outfit left in Redlands. Bill followed in his footsteps as manager of the Foothill Groves packinghouse and ran his own company shipping citrus and fresh produce to Asian markets. So the last hand on this knight's reins was a Redlands orange man.

The Redlands Co-operative Fruit Association packed under more than one name. The Winterthur Library in Delaware keeps one of its Sunny Heights labels, "Grown on the Sunny Heights of Redlands," Cal State San Bernardino's archive has its Juciful brand, and the Huntington Library has a photograph of the association's packing house. If you ask me, though, Royal Knight is the handsomest of the lot.

🍊 Redlands, Navel Orange Country

Redlands got its name from the dirt. When a civil engineer named Frank E. Brown and a New York stockbroker, E. G. Judson, laid out the Redlands Colony, they named it for the color of the red adobe soil, and the city incorporated on November 26, 1888.

The navel orange did the rest. In 1890 Redlands marketed a thousand railroad cars of navels. By 1904 it was sending out over a million boxes in more than 9,000 railroad cars from over 30 packing houses. By the late 1930s the town was a fruit-packing center ringed by more than 15,000 acres of citrus groves, and in the 1937–38 season alone it shipped more than 4,200 railcars of navel oranges and 1,300 cars of Valencias. For almost three-quarters of a century Redlands sat at the heart of the largest navel orange growing region in the world, and it drew people from all over the world from the late 1800s to the late 1950s. The navel orange became the picture that tourists and the rest of the country had of Southern California.

All that money built a pretty town. Around the turn of the century Redlands was the Palm Springs of its day, drawing visitors from all over the world. The A.K. Smiley Public Library went up in 1898 in a Moorish style, and Redlands even has a real castle of its own: Kimberly Crest, the mansion built in 1897, was featured on PBS's America's Castles.

The groves are mostly gone now. The City of Redlands counts just one packing house left, serving about 2,500 acres of citrus still in production. Labels like this one are how the rest of it gets remembered.

🏡 Display

Crate Labels are a reminder of a bygone era but the amazing lithography process 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 these out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries then they will be very difficult to acquire.

Imagine this amazing vintage advertising hanging as home decor in any room of your home instead of a museum! A knight and a castle look right at home in a kitchen, a den or a kid's room, and it's a perfect gift for anybody from Redlands and the Inland Empire.