Vintage 1940s Setter Brand Crate Label 🍎 Exeter Fruit Association California, Mahogany Setter Dog, Unused NOS

🐕 The Exeter Fruit Association's Handsome Ambassador

Every crate of fruit that left the little packing town of Exeter, California carried a name that had to be remembered -- and the Exeter Fruit Association chose to be remembered by a dog. This is their Setter brand: a big, warm-eyed mahogany setter gazing out from a green disc, his name spelled in bold golden letters, pasted once on the end of a fruit lug so that a wholesale buyer in a distant market would reach for this grower's box and no one else's. This is that label -- a genuine survivor of a specific California fruit house, offered exactly as it has come down to us.

What you are looking at is the Setter Brand label of the Exeter Fruit Association, Exeter, California, marked "Produce of U.S.A." It is a 13 by 4 inch horizontal lug-box label, and everything described below is drawn from the label itself, from what the photographs show, and from what can honestly be learned about the house that shipped under it.

🍊 Who the Exeter Fruit Association Was

Exeter sits in Tulare County, at the foot of the Sierra in California's San Joaquin Valley -- one of the great fruit-growing regions on earth, and a town whose whole economy grew up around the packing house. The Exeter Fruit Association was a grower-shippers' packing association there: local growers pooling their harvest, grading and packing it under shared brands, and sending it to market by the freight car. In the mid-twentieth century a Valley packing house lived and died by its brands, and the Association ran several -- the Setter among them.

The Association shipped under one of the most respected marketing umbrellas in the business, the California Fruit Exchange, whose famous "Blue Anchor" trademark appears on its sister label in this same series. The California Fruit Exchange was organized in 1901, headquartered in Sacramento, and grew into the leading marketing organization of the entire deciduous fresh-fruit industry -- so a box wearing the Exeter Fruit Association's Setter brand was traveling inside one of the strongest sales networks American fruit had. That is the world this cheerful dog worked in: a real cooperative, a real packing town, real fruit rolling east on real trains.

🐶 The Setter Brand and Its Art

The star, of course, is the dog. He is a setter rendered in rich, glowing mahogany and chestnut red -- the deep, solid coat associated with the Irish setter -- with long feathered ears, an intelligent eye and a proud, lifted profile, the very picture of a gun dog on point. He is set against a flat green circle over a field of deep royal blue, so the warm reds of the coat blaze against the cool ground. To the right, the brand name SETTER marches across in fat, three-dimensional golden-yellow letters edged in orange and cast on a green shadow, with "BRAND" tucked at the end. Below run the Association's own lines -- "Exeter Fruit Association, Exeter, California, Produce of U.S.A." -- and a red border frames the whole. A grower did not choose a noble hunting dog by accident: he wanted a mark a buyer would remember, respect and ask for again, and a handsome setter did exactly that job.

📅 What This Label Tells Us About Its Own Age

You will see labels of this kind dated to the 1940s, but this one carries printed proof of something later, and we would rather be accurate than flattering. Printed right into the Association's address is a five-digit ZIP code -- "Exeter, California 93221." The United States Post Office did not introduce ZIP codes until July of 1963, so a label bearing one cannot have been printed before then. That places this Setter label in the 1960s or later -- a genuine vintage piece from the last chapter of the Exeter Fruit Association's paper-label era, not a wartime relic. Far from a drawback, that little number is a printed date-stamp hiding in the address, and it lets us describe the piece with real confidence.

📦 Why It Is Still Bright: New Old Stock

Labels like this survive because the wooden crate itself went away. Through the 1950s and 1960s pre-printed cardboard cartons -- cheaper, lighter, with the brand printed straight on the box -- replaced wooden crates, and packing houses were left holding stacks of paper labels that were never pasted onto a single crate. Those bundles were shelved, forgotten, and rediscovered decades later, still crisp. This Setter is one of those unused survivors: the crate it was printed for never came. The color is full and bright, the paper clean, and -- as the reverse photographs show -- the back is a plain, unmarked cream sheet with only the faint ghost of the front print showing through. No paste, no crate splinters, no grime.

🔍 Condition, Exactly as Pictured

• 🟢 Unused new old stock. Never applied to a crate -- no paste residue on the back, no mounting damage, no trimming.
• 🔴 Bright, original color. The reds of the dog, the golden letters, the blue ground and the green disc all read strong and clean in the photographs.
• 📄 Clean blank back. The reverse is a plain cream sheet with only the print faintly ghosting through, as shown.
• 📏 Size: a 13 by 4 inch horizontal lug label, made for the end of a fruit lug box.
• 🔎 Honest age: ordinary light handling for a stored vintage paper label; offered exactly as pictured, nothing added, nothing hidden.

🖼️ How to Live With It

• 🎨 Frame it as a single bold graphic -- the long, narrow shape is perfect over a doorway, along a shelf, or in a row down a hallway.
• 🐕 Build a dog-lover's wall: this setter sits beautifully beside other vintage hunting, sporting or breed art, and instantly warms a study, mudroom or cabin.
• 🍊 Group it with its Exeter Fruit Association sibling, the Pursuit label, or with other San Joaquin Valley fruit labels for a gallery of one region's golden age.
• 🎁 Give it as a genuinely-old, affordable gift for a setter owner, a bird hunter, a graphic-design lover or a fan of mid-century Americana.

🐕 Who This Belongs With

This one has a few natural homes: the setter owner who will fall for that noble mahogany head; the crate-label collector who values an unused, named-grower example and appreciates the honest ZIP-code dating; the lover of mid-century commercial art who wants a real printed artifact rather than a reproduction; and the gift-giver after something with age, warmth and character that will not break the bank. For any of them, this is a single, specific piece of the Exeter Fruit Association's history, offered exactly as it survived.

❓ Questions Worth Answering

Who made and shipped this?

The Exeter Fruit Association, a grower-shippers' packing house in Exeter, Tulare County, California, which shipped under the California Fruit Exchange's Blue Anchor cooperative. This is their Setter brand.

Is it original or a reproduction?

An original, genuine vintage lithographed crate label -- unused new old stock, never applied to a crate. Not a modern reprint.

Why do you say 1960s when similar labels are called 1940s?

Because this one prints a five-digit ZIP code (93221), and ZIP codes did not exist before July 1963. The label itself proves it was printed in the 1960s or later.

What condition is the back in, and how big is it?

Clean and blank, with only the faint ghost of the front showing through; 13 by 4 inches, the horizontal lug format.

How many are available?

This listing is for one label, offered exactly as pictured.

📜 A Working Brand, Not Just a Picture

It is worth remembering that the Setter was never meant to be art -- it was meant to sell fruit, and that is exactly what makes it interesting now. When a box of the Exeter Fruit Association's fruit reached a big-city produce terminal, it landed in a sea of nearly identical wooden crates, and the buyer's eye had only a second to choose. The Setter brand was the Association's answer to that second: a single, dignified animal a buyer could spot, remember and ask for again by name. Every choice on the label serves that goal -- the pedigree-red coat that reads across a warehouse, the spotlight green disc, the confident block letters. Owning it today, you are holding a small, successful piece of mid-century salesmanship from one real California packing house, and that working purpose is a large part of its charm.

✨ Why It Matters

Some old things are collected because they are rare; this one is a joy because it is real and specific. It is a genuine relic of the Exeter Fruit Association -- one packing house, in one Valley town, that sent its fruit to market behind a proud mahogany setter and the Blue Anchor cooperative that carried it east. Spared the crate it was printed for, it reaches you decades later still bright and unused, carrying no invented pedigree and needing none. What it offers is the thing itself: a handsome dog, a named California grower, and a framable slice of the fruit country's golden age.