Pictures of Golden State Sold Oranges and Dreams
Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel
Art isn’t just something you see in a book or a museum. It’s a part of our everyday lives and can emerge out of the humblest circumstances when you least expect it…even in an orange grove.
Orange crate art – the colorful scenes of idyllic orange groves, panoramic fields and mountains, and the people picking the fruit – was created to sell California oranges across the nation in the 1880s when the expanding transcontinental railroad routes began connecting the West and East.
What started as a simple marketing tool to identify one grower’s oranges from the rest, not only built the produce industry, but attracted people from every corner of the U.S. to the Golden State to experience the California Dream.
The bright paper packing labels, glued onto orange crates that were shipped to buyers, weren’t thought of as art or anything to be saved. They were just a profitable way to draw attention to each farm’s produce.
What helped to make the vivid labels possible was the development of the lithographic printing process and specialty inks – often with secret formulas guarded by the designers.
SurfWriter Girl Patti is especially fond of orange crate art because it reminds her of special days at her grandmother’s house in Santa Ana when she and her sister Eileen would run into the orange grove behind the house, zig zagging around the smudge pots, to pick oranges from the trees.
“Grandma gave us each a large, brown grocery bag and we would fill it to the top with fresh-picked oranges,” says Patti. “We’d always take home bags full of oranges and grandma would make us orange juice, squeezed by hand in an orange juice squeezer.”
“There were so many orange trees out back that growers from local co-ops would come each year to pick them, paying grandma for each box,” Patti recalls. “You can still see the original Sunkist Orange County Fruit Exchange building on nearby Glassell Street in Orange.”
By the late 1950s orange crates were replaced with less-expensive cardboard boxes and the artistic labels were discontinued, a victim of cost-saving and modernization. For the most part, people forgot about the labels and their romanticized odes to the California dream.
But a few collectors recognized the labels’ artistic value and preserved the fragile paper advertisements for future generations to enjoy. And later, in the 1960s and 1970s, some treasure troves of forgotten orange crate labels were discovered in printers’ shops and stashed away in packing warehouses.
By then, these vibrant vestiges of another time were ready to stand on their own merit – not just as functional shipping labels, but as 12″ x 25″ artists’ canvases that glorified the Golden state…capturing its story one slice in time.
Oranges, lemons, limes.
Memories of special times
when each California crate
showcased the golden state.
To see this original California art form for yourself, visit the Picturing Paradise orange crate art exhibit at the Hilbert Museum in Orange, CA. It runs until April 19, 2025.
Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel hold the exclusive rights to this copyrighted material. Publications wishing to reprint it may contact them at surfwriter.girls@gmail.com Individuals and non-profit groups are welcome to post it on social media sites as long as credit is given.