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👑 His crown says king. His snowy beard, rosy cheeks and big open-mouthed laugh say Santa Claus. Either way, the Linda Loma Ranch of Visalia, California decided a 28-pound lug of Thompson Seedless grapes deserved royalty, and this vintage 1950s Table Treat grape crate label is how it said so. It is new old stock, never pasted to a lug, from the last decade of the paper crate label, when a strip of color on the end of a wooden box was how a grower told a buyer on the far side of the country whose grapes these were.
The picture at the center is a laughing, white-bearded king in a tall gold crown banded with pearls, set with jewels and topped with a small red cross. A pleated ruff circles his neck, and a gold rampant lion on a heraldic shield floats at his shoulder. TABLE and TREAT stand in huge cream block letters on a red ground; the ranch lines run in green script and capitals across a dark band below; the variety and weight sit in a yellow panel at the right. The label measures 11 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches, the long, narrow shape made for the end of a grape lug.
Look at him for more than a second and you start to wonder whether he is a monarch or Saint Nick in borrowed regalia. The crown, the ruff and the lion shield make him royalty. The beard and the belly laugh make him the kind of king who could pass for Old King Cole, the "merry old soul" of the nursery rhyme.
That rhyme has its own legend. It was first printed in 1708-09, in William King's Useful Transactions in Philosophy, and nobody has ever settled who Cole really was. One old candidate is Coel Hen, "Coel the Old," a ruler of late Roman Britain remembered for his long life. The town of Colchester in Essex long told the story that it was named for him, a tale historians reject: the name comes from the Latin colonia and the Old English ceaster, not from any King Cole. The legend never let that stop it.
Crate labels were made to pull one grower's box out of a crowded market, and Table Treat does it with a single idea: grapes good enough for a king's table, with the king himself grinning on the box. The heraldic lion and jeweled crown borrow Old World pomp for a crate of fruit grown in the San Joaquin Valley. The practical lines are all there too, the grape variety and the guaranteed minimum weight, so a buyer knew exactly what was inside before the lid came off.
The label names two parties. Across the dark band: Linda Loma Ranch, growers and packers, of Visalia. Inside the diamond, in white script on a splash of red: JENAN Bros., the brothers whose seal vouches for "quality fruits." A ranch name for the brand, a brothers' firm on the seal of approval, a town, a variety and a weight. For a small Valley grower, this label is the record, and it is printed right on the face.
Visalia is the oldest continuously inhabited inland European settlement between Stockton and Los Angeles. Nathaniel Vise built a log cabin on the north bank of Mill Creek in December 1851, and the settlement took its name from him and from his family's hometown in Kentucky. On March 11, 1854, Visalia became the seat of Tulare County after an election it won 44 votes to 41 over Woodsville. John Butterfield's Overland Mail stage first came through on October 8, 1858.
Then came the railroad snub. In 1872 Southern Pacific president Leland Stanford refused to run the main line through the already built-up town, and the tracks went through Goshen, 7 miles west, instead. Visalia answered by incorporating its own Visalia-Goshen railroad in May 1874 to reach them.
The farmland around the town became its fortune. Tulare County was ranked the top agricultural producer in the United States for 2022, with more than $8.6 billion in farm products, and its growers harvest more than 28,000 acres of table grapes.
The variety on this label was one man's project. William Thompson, an Englishman born in Wistow, Yorkshire in 1816, settled with his family in Sutter County, California, near Yuba City, in 1863. In 1872 he sent to the Ellwanger & Barry nursery of Rochester, New York for cuttings of a grape called Lady de Coverly; only one survived. Grafted onto his existing rootstock, it gave him his first crop in 1875, 50 pounds of large, sweet, thin-skinned seedless grapes, which he showed in Marysville. The grape became known as Thompson's Seedless.
The grape's ancestry runs back to lands that are now Iran and Turkey. Thompson gave cuttings away freely; J. P. Onstott planted the first 200-acre vineyard, and by 1920 Thompson Seedless had replaced the seeded Muscat of Alexandria as California's raisin grape. Today it accounts for about 95 percent of California's raisins, and the site of Thompson's vine in Yuba City is California Historical Landmark No. 929.
Paper crate labels began on the West Coast in the 1880s, in California and Washington, when the new transcontinental railroads made it possible to ship fruit east. Before the 1920s they were printed by stone lithography; afterward, by offset lithography. Grape labels took this long, narrow form because grapes shipped in flatter lug boxes.
World War II squeezed the crate makers' labor and the printers' metal supplies, and after the war cheaper disposable cardboard took over, with simpler words and pictures printed straight onto the box. Paper labels hung on until the 1950s. This Table Treat comes from that closing chapter, and it survived because it was never glued to a lug.
A decade after the crate label faded out, California's table grapes became a national story. On September 8, 1965, Larry Itliong of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee led some 1,500 Filipino farmworkers out on strike against grape growers around Delano, just south of the Tulare County line, demanding the federal minimum wage and the right to organize. César Chávez and Dolores Huerta brought the National Farm Workers Association in alongside them, and the two groups merged into the United Farm Workers.
The union called a nationwide boycott of table grapes. Households stopped buying them, and union dockworkers let non-union grapes rot in port rather than load them. After five years, in July 1970, most of the major Delano-area growers signed contracts paying pickers $1.80 an hour plus 20 cents a box, with a union health plan and protection from pesticides. The trade this label once served was changed for good.
Is the man on this label Santa Claus?
He is drawn as a king, with a jeweled crown, a pleated ruff and a lion shield, but his white beard and laugh give him a strong Santa look.
Who grew and packed these grapes?
The label credits Linda Loma Ranch of Visalia as growers and packers and carries the diamond seal of JENAN Bros.
What is a grape lug?
The flat wooden box table grapes were shipped in. Long, narrow labels like this one were made to fit its end.
Has this label been used?
No. It is new old stock and was never pasted onto a box.
Where did Thompson Seedless grapes come from?
William Thompson grew the first California crop near Yuba City in 1875 from a single surviving Lady de Coverly cutting.
How old is it?
It is a 1950s label, from the final years before printed cardboard cartons replaced paper crate labels.
🖼️ Frame it long and low over a kitchen doorway, in a wine nook or along a bar shelf, or bring the laughing king out for the holidays.
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