Fruit & Vegetable Labels

A fruit crate label had a short life. It was pasted on the end of a wooden box, seen by a buyer at a wholesale market for a few seconds, and thrown away with the crate. That is exactly why the good ones were designed to grab attention.

Crate labels came into wide use in the late 19th century, when railroads and refrigerated cars made it possible to ship fresh fruit across the country. Growers and packing houses needed a way to tell their boxes apart in a crowded produce yard, and a bright printed label was the answer. The heyday ran from the 1880s into the 1950s, when cardboard cartons with printed designs replaced the wooden crate and the labels disappeared.

Apples are the heart of this collection. Much of the apple label trade came from the orchard country of the Pacific Northwest, especially the valleys of Washington and Oregon, though growers in other states used them too. Each packing house had its own brands, and a single grower might use different labels for different grades of fruit. The names ran to the cheerful and the boastful: big red apples, mountain scenery, Indian chiefs, pretty girls, animals and birds.

Cranberries are a smaller group with a separate story. They come from the bogs of Massachusetts, New Jersey and Wisconsin, and in 1930 several growers joined into the cooperative that later became Ocean Spray.

Look at the printing. The early labels were made by stone lithography, with each color laid down from a separate stone, and the color is rich and deep in a way modern printing rarely matches. Later labels were printed by offset and tend to be flatter and bolder, with simple shapes meant to read from across a warehouse. Look too at the small type along the bottom. The packer's name and town tell you where the fruit was grown, and that little line is often the most useful thing on the label.