Vintage Late 1960s-90s Camel Mountain Pears Crate Label 🍐 Loomis CA Desert For Sale

Size: 10.25 x 7.5 inches ~ Little to no wear.

Whoever picked the artwork for this one wasn\'t thinking about the Sierra foothills at all - it\'s a desert sunset, a saddled camel and a robed figure kneeling on the sand with both hands raised toward a huge red sun, palm trees on the horizon. Somehow that\'s how you sold pears out of Placer County. This unused label is CAMEL Brand Mountain Pears, grown and packed by Blue Anchor, Inc. of Loomis, California.

CAMEL runs across the top in big black letters outlined in green on an orange sky, with a small BRAND tucked in at the end, and MOUNTAIN PEARS and FROM PLACER COUNTY underneath. In the corner sits the yellow Blue Anchor roundel: BLUE ANCHOR, CALIFORNIA FRUIT EXCHANGE, REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. Along the bottom, inside a royal-blue border, it reads PRODUCE OF U.S.A., GROWN AND PACKED BY BLUE ANCHOR, INC., LOOMIS, CALIFORNIA with its ZIP code, and CONTENTS 4/5 BUSHEL. The back is blank.

That ZIP code and the \"Blue Anchor, Inc.\" packer line date the sheet: five-digit ZIP codes only started in 1963, and the California Fruit Exchange wasn\'t renamed Blue Anchor, Inc. until 1969 - so this one comes from 1969 or later, even though the corner seal still carries the old California Fruit Exchange name.

The California Fruit Exchange incorporated on May 1, 1901, with member associations out of Loomis, Newcastle and Penryn, and grew into the largest deciduous fruit marketing cooperative in the world, with more than a thousand grower members at its peak. The anchor itself was the idea of George H. Cutter, a founding member who served sixteen years as the Exchange\'s president - he suggested it as a symbol as early as 1903, it went into first use in 1904, and by 1923 it was a registered trademark reserved for the co-op\'s highest-quality fruit. When the Exchange built its Spanish Colonial headquarters in Sacramento in 1931, it was named the Blue Anchor Building and dedicated to Cutter\'s memory; the Exchange worked out of it until 1966, and the building is on the National Register of Historic Places today.

Loomis, up in the Placer County foothills alongside Newcastle and Penryn, was serious fruit country - the first carload of fresh California fruit ever shipped east left Newcastle for Chicago around 1879. The Exchange put its own Loomis Agency in place in 1928, and the packing house it built there in 1931 stayed in operation until the agency closed in 1994; in the 1940s the Loomis district alone was loading 4,500 railcars of plums every summer. \"Mountain pears\" simply meant pears grown up in that foothill country, and the Blue Anchor mark on the box told a buyer back east it had come through the Exchange\'s grading.

That orange sunset makes a striking piece framed in a kitchen or a den - good gift for anyone with roots in Loomis, Newcastle or Placer County.

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 Camel (Blue Anchor, Inc. / California Fruit Exchange)