Antique 1930s Drum Major Citrus Crate Label 🥁 Umatilla FL Marching Band Decor For Sale

Size: 9 x 3.75 inches ~ Little to no wear.

A high-stepping drum majorette leading the parade right across a citrus crate. An antique 1930s Drum Major Brand label from the Umatilla Citrus Growers Association of Umatilla, Florida, never pasted on a box, cut in a long strip with all four corners clipped off - it looks almost like a little banner.

On the left, a smiling blonde majorette mid-strut, knee up, baton raised, in a plumed white and gold hat, a green jacket with gold braid, a white pleated skirt, white tasseled boots and a bright orange cape flying out behind her. Beside her, DRUM MAJOR in big yellow letters with a red inline on a deep navy-purple ground, PRODUCE OF U.S.A. in light blue and a small BRAND in yellow. Across the bottom, on a solid orange band: UMATILLA CITRUS GROWERS ASS'N. and UMATILLA, FLORIDA. The back is plain, with the lettering showing faintly through.

A girl drum major was brand new and exciting when this label was drawn. In the late 1930s the majorette made her debut, as band directors started putting a baton twirler or two out front to liven up the marching band. It caught on fast - high school girls all over the country wanted in, batons got made shorter and lighter for them, and through the '40s, '50s and '60s more and more girls became majorettes. A packing house putting one on its crates was right in step with the times.

Umatilla sits up in the lake country of Lake County, central Florida - named after Umatilla, Oregon, and in the Native American language of the Pacific Northwest the word is said to mean "water rippling over sand." Locally they call it the "Land of Many Waters," which fits a town ringed by some 40 clear-water lakes within two miles. The town incorporated on November 8, 1904.

Early settlers raised vegetables and cattle before planting orange groves, and the Great Freezes of 1894 and 1895 wiped most of it out. They planted again, and citrus carried Umatilla through the twentieth century - a huge packing and citrus processing plant became the town's biggest business, until the hard freezes of 1977, 1981, 1983, 1985 and 1989 killed most of the groves in Lake County.

The Umatilla Citrus Growers Association was founded in 1909 as a growers' cooperative, and the story around town is that the upstairs wooden floor of the first packinghouse doubled as a roller-skating rink back around 1912. By 1914 the association had bought a packing house at the corner of SR 19 and West Ocala Street. C.B. Hipson managed it from 1943 to 1972, and John Westervelt served as its board president from 1965 until his death in 2020. It lasted more than a hundred years, until citrus greening and low fruit prices finally forced it to close. Its Duckhead label was its U.S. No. 1 packing mark, and it still turns up on the signs at Umatilla's citrus history celebrations. The Museum of Florida History keeps a Drum Major label in its own citrus label collection.

Crate labels are a reminder of a bygone era, and the lithography on them 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 them out to preserve their history. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, they will be very difficult to Drum Major