Today’s fruits and vegetables are shipped in mass-produced cardboard boxes, but historically, growers, packers, and shippers used wooden crates to transport their fruit and vegetables. On one end of the crate, a colorful paper label was pasted to designate who or where the produce came from.

Texas citrus labels date from the 1920s through the 1960s. The largest number of these labels that exists today date primarily in the 1940s and 1950s. There are fewer Texas labels available than there are California labels because label collecting wasn’t always a popular pastime in Texas. In California, however, people have been collecting labels since 1890 when young boys collected and traded them like baseball cards. Unfortunately, in Texas, most labels were destroyed when their usability expired.

Other regions known for their fruit and vegetable labels are Florida (dating back to 1904) and Arizona (dating back to the 1890s). Washington, Oregon, and Colorado are also know specifically for their beautiful apple, pear, cherry, and plum labels.

Another source of beautiful labels and rich history is cans. From the late 1900s to the 1930s, there were several large canneries, especially on the East and West coasts. Often the canneries were founded or operated by immigrants, and it’s not unlikely that you’ll find instructions written in old German or other foreign languages on these early labels.

Many early canneries were family operations, and they displayed the family name or a picture of a family member on the can labels. Large printing companies eventually developed stock labels, so the same graphic would appear on the labels of more than one canner or packing company. Only the text on these labels was revised for each individual company.

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