Vintage 1950s Winner Crate Label 🐎 Harness Racing Horse & Sulky, Birds Nest VA

Why Would a Virginia Produce Packer Put a Racehorse on a Crate? 🐎 A Vintage 1950s Winner Crate Label, H. C. West & Sons, Birds Nest, Virginia

Size: 6 1/2" x 3 1/4"

Because the brand was WINNER, and nothing says winner like a trotter at full stride. A chestnut horse wearing number 5 on his saddle pad and on the card at his head pulls a sulky, the driver in red and yellow silks with the whip up, inside an oval on a mustard-yellow ground. Below it reads PRODUCE OF U. S. A. and H. C. WEST & SONS, BIRDS NEST, VA. It doesn't say what went in the crate - potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage, the buyers knew - and these were never pasted on one.

🌾 Birds Nest, on the Eastern Shore

Birds Nest - Birdsnest on most maps - is a little crossroads in Northampton County, down on the Virginia end of the Delmarva Peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. It was a stop on the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad, which is why some railroad lists call it Bridgetown Station, and it had its own post office until October 2011.

The story of the name is a good one. A 1927 survey of Northampton County says it came from a low room in the middle of an old tavern there. Frances Benjamin Johnston photographed that building in the 1930s for her survey of Southern architecture and called it a sailors' tavern, a mile or two from the marshes of Hog Island Bay. The other story you'll hear is that the first settlers just found a lot of birds' nests. Take your pick - I like the tavern.

🥔 Potato country

This was serious farm country. Northampton County has grown potatoes since 1845, the Eastern Shore of Virginia Produce Exchange was chartered on January 20, 1900, Shore farmers dug 13 million bushels of Irish potatoes in 1924, and in 1928 the Exchange alone needed 23,000 railroad boxcars to haul the crop north. The NYP&N carried the cars up the spine of the peninsula, and from Cape Charles its car floats crossed the bay to Norfolk. Every packer on that platform was shipping the same potatoes, so the label on the end of the crate was how a buyer in Philadelphia or New York remembered whose were good. The old story on the Shore is that a packer never let a good brand go once the buyers knew it.

👨‍🌾 H. C. West & Sons

I've dug for H. C. West & Sons and haven't turned up who H. C. was, when the firm started or when it quit - just this label. The & Sons tells you it was a family outfit, a father and his boys putting their name on every crate.

🏇 The trotter

The horse is a Standardbred, America's own harness breed. It goes back to Messenger, a gray Thoroughbred brought over in 1788, and his great-grandson Hambletonian 10, foaled in 1849, sired so many trotters that nearly every one racing today traces to him. Harness racing was the county-fair sport, and Currier & Ives sold trotting prints by the thousands to hang in farmhouse parlors. On this same peninsula the Great Pocomoke Fair started in 1901, and Ocean Downs opened as a harness track near Ocean City, Maryland in 1949 - right about when this label was printed.

🖨️ Selling vegetables like racehorses

Picture a wooden crate coming off a Virginia farm into a crowded railyard or onto a ferry dock. A wholesale buyer might give it a couple of seconds at most, and the growers understood that better than anybody. Until cardboard cartons moved in during the 1950s, nearly everything that grew went to market in wood, and the paper label glued to the end of the box was what told one grower's lettuce from the next fellow's at the terminal market.

Thousands of packing houses around the country were each paying commercial lithographers for art of their own, and the sheets came off the presses by the tens of thousands, in color and detail nobody had any business spending on a box of cabbage. The method was multi-stone color lithography, the very process behind fine art prints and circus posters. Every color needed its own stone or plate, prepared by hand and lined up dead true against the others, and that's where the saturated red in the driver's silks and the crisp black of the sulky wheel come from. It was skilled work sold for pennies a sheet, a working-class cousin of fine printmaking, and print and design collections, museums among them, make gallery room for crate labels today.

🏁 Why call it Winner?

Produce brands of this period loved a name that made a promise, whether that was freshness, quality or a sure bet for the buyer working his way down a row of crates. Call your brand Winner, draw the horse in the act of winning, and the picture does all the bragging so the packing house never has to say a word. That was a favorite trick of the trade, a bit of American sales psychology riding around on the end of a vegetable box. And there's real nerve in it, handing a load of Shore vegetables the title and then showing the race to back it up.

🚜 The Shore's truck farms

That skinny finger of land ranked with the most important truck-farming country anywhere on the East Coast. Mild coastal weather and good vegetable soil gave Shore growers the thing that mattered most, which was timing. Strawberries, tomatoes, cabbage and both kinds of potato, white and sweet, could go north by rail car and steamer early enough in the season to reach Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore ahead of the competition. Northampton County's own history says it was once the major potato producer for the whole country. The railroad was laid down the length of the peninsula to carry exactly that freight, and for decades the sidings and packing sheds through Northampton and Accomack Counties ran as hard as any industrial corridor in Virginia, just with cabbage where the coal would have been. Even the containers were an industry of their own, with the Northampton Lumber Company turning out wooden potato barrels, up to 500 a day.

Every one of those farm towns, Birds Nest among them, had packing houses of its own, all chasing the same buyers. So a label was never just decoration. A house with a name the buyers had come to trust could get a better price on a crate sight unseen, and the way old-timers on the Shore tell it, a good reputation printed in ink was worth every bit as much as the vegetables under it. As for the tavern in the name story, it went into the photographic record as Old Birdsnest's Tavern, in the Marionville vicinity.

🎪 Fair day and market day

A sulky racer like this one is no decorative flourish. American county fairs were holding organized trotting races as early as 1825, and harness horses went on to fill fairgrounds and small-town tracks all over the rural country. Just about every ag fair ran a half-mile oval of its own, and Virginia farm families knew the sight of a sulky whipping through the turn behind a hard-driven trotter as well as they knew their own produce wagon. Local legend among crate label collectors says packing houses often lifted their brand names and pictures straight from the fairground, going after the same crowds and the same who's-going-to-win excitement that made market day and race day the two big dates on the calendar. A red-and-yellow driver and a hard-charging number 5 on the end of a crate says plenty about what got folks' attention on the Eastern Shore.

📦 The family name on the box

Up and down the Shore, putting the family name on the goods was the usual way of doing business. It was a point of pride and it was accountability too, since a buyer stuck with a poor crate this year knew exactly whose name to watch for the next. Small independent packing houses were the backbone of the Shore's produce trade, filling in around the bigger cooperative sheds and building a reputation one shipping season at a time.

🖼️ From throwaway to folk art

The funny thing is that what makes these labels so wanted now is the very thing that made them disposable then. They were glued onto rough wooden crates by the thousands and meant to go in the trash the moment the crate was empty. The hands gluing them on down in Birds Nest never imagined that artwork matted and hanging in a frame generations on. When cardboard cartons took over shipping nationwide, a whole category of commercial art closed up along with the wooden crate, and folk art and advertising art collections have been carving out room for it ever since.

🐎 About these

Every one I have is unused, 6 1/2 by 3 1/4 inches. It looks great framed in a farmhouse kitchen, with other crate labels, next to a racing print, or on the wall of anybody from the Eastern Shore. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Winner labels for H. C. West & Sons again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.