Antique 1930s Umatilla Belle Citrus Crate Label 🍊 FL Native American Woman Art For Sale

What Did Florida Growers Reach For When They Wanted Their Fruit Noticed on a Northern Grocer\'s Shelf? 🍊

Size: 9\" x 3 1/2\"

Long before barcodes and pallet wrap, a wooden citrus crate rolling north out of Central Florida carried only one thing to catch a buyer\'s eye: the label glued to its end. Packing houses up and down the state competed for attention with bold color, striking portraiture, and brand names meant to be remembered — and few captured that spirit quite like Umatilla Belle. This is one of those labels, held back from ever seeing crate or citrus, a genuine piece of Florida\'s golden citrus era frozen exactly as the printer left it.

This is an original Umatilla Belle citrus crate label, produced for the Umatilla Citrus Growers Association of Umatilla, Florida, and documented to the 1930s. It measures 9\" x 3.5\", cut in the elongated, angle-cornered shape typical of crate-end labels of the era. The artwork centers on a young Native American woman. The label reads \"UMATILLA BELLE\", with smaller text beneath reading \"Packed & Shipped by Umatilla Citrus Growers Assn., Umatilla, Florida.\" This example is New Old Stock (NOS) — printed for use, never applied to a crate, and never put into service.

🍊 The Citrus Growers Association & Florida\'s \"Golden Buckle\"

The Umatilla Citrus Growers Association organized in 1909, founded by local grove families whose names still echo through the town\'s history — Collins, Austin, Osborne, and Kennedy among them. By 1914 the association had built its own packing house at the corner of what\'s now State Road 19 and West Ocala Street, and from that building, generations of Umatilla growers sorted, wrapped, and shipped their fruit north under a rotating cast of brand names — Umatilla Belle among them.

Local histories describe Umatilla, in its prime, as \"the golden buckle of the citrus belt\" — a phrase that speaks to just how central this small Lake County town became to Florida\'s fruit economy. Its proximity to the St. Johns River gave growers an early edge in getting fruit to northern markets, and at its peak, Lake County ranked as the second most productive citrus county in the entire state. That kind of standing didn\'t come without hardship: Florida\'s citrus industry endured a brutal boom-and-bust rhythm tied to weather, most devastatingly the Great Freezes of 1894–1895 that wiped out entire groves across the region, and later a string of freezes through the 1980s so severe they permanently reshaped where citrus could even be grown in the state. Umatilla\'s association weathered every one of them.

What the freezes couldn\'t do, disease eventually did. Longtime manager Doris Mabry, who joined the association in 1972, guided it through killing freezes and lean financial years alike — but citrus greening disease, which first appeared in Florida in 2005, proved to be the one adversary a century-old cooperative couldn\'t outlast. The Umatilla Citrus Growers Association closed after more than one hundred years of continuous operation, a run few agricultural cooperatives anywhere can claim.

🌊 Umatilla: The \"Land of Many Waters\"

The town itself long predates the label. Nathan J. Trowell is credited as Umatilla\'s founder in 1856, with the name itself suggested by early settler William A. Whitcomb and formally registered with the U.S. Land Office in Gainesville in 1876. The name was borrowed from a town in Oregon, itself an Indigenous word generally translated as \"laughing waters\" — a fitting choice for a Central Florida community set among some forty clearwater lakes within a two-mile radius, a landscape locals still nod to when they call the area the \"Land of Many Waters.\"

Growth came in fits and starts. The St. Johns and Lake Eustis Line railroad reached Umatilla from Astor in 1880, opening the town to real commerce, and citrus groves quickly followed — only to be devastated by the Great Freezes of the mid-1890s, a setback that forced many of the earliest pioneer growers to start over. The town persevered, and was formally incorporated on November 8, 1904, by a narrow vote of its residents — a detail that speaks to just how small and close-knit a community was deciding its own future at the turn of the last century. Today Umatilla is known locally as the Gateway to the Ocala National Forest, a title that ties the town\'s citrus-era identity to the wilderness that still surrounds it.

👩‍🌾 The Faces Behind the Packing House

Crate labels rarely credit the people who kept a cooperative running, but Umatilla\'s history remembers a few by name. Beyond founder Nathan Trowell and namesake William Whitcomb, the association itself was steered for decades by manager Doris Mabry and by John Westervelt, who served as board president from 1965 until his death in 2020 — a 55-year tenure later honored when Umatilla High School named its football field for him. These weren\'t distant executives; in a town this size, the men and women behind the crate label were neighbors, and their names are stitched into the town\'s civic memory as much as its citrus history.

🎭 A Town of \"Belles\" and \"Warriors\": The Local Label Rivalry

What makes Umatilla especially interesting to crate-label collectors is that the town\'s Indigenous-sounding name inspired a small local tradition of Native American imagery across competing Umatilla brands — a genuinely local phenomenon rather than a single company\'s idea. Alongside Umatilla Belle, the Umatilla Fruit Company shipped fruit under a \"Red Warrior\" brand, and Umatilla Packers Inc. ran an \"Indian Warrior\" label featuring its own portrait of a Native American brave. Local legend among label collectors holds that these rival packing houses, all working out of the same small Lake County town and all drawing on the same borrowed Oregon place-name, leaned into Native American imagery almost as a shared civic branding — each association putting its own face, its own \"Belle\" or \"Warrior,\" on fruit grown from the very same soil. Whether that was deliberate rivalry or simple coincidence of a shared town name, it left behind a small cluster of beautifully distinct labels, of which Umatilla Belle remains among the most striking and best documented.

📦 From Grove Crate to Collector\'s Wall

For decades, labels like this one lived entirely on the ends of wooden citrus crates, meant to be seen for a shipment\'s journey and then discarded once the fruit was unpacked at market. Very few survived that fate uncreased, unglued, and unused — most that exist today were pulled from crates already applied, showing the wear of a working life. A piece like this, held back in printer\'s stock and never affixed to a single crate, represents a genuinely different category: artwork exactly as it left the press, never asked to do the job it was printed for. With the Umatilla Citrus Growers Association\'s century-long run now closed and Florida\'s citrus landscape forever altered by disease and development, labels carrying this cooperative\'s name have become one of the more tangible physical records of a business, and a way of life, that no longer operates the way it once did.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🍊 Frame it alongside real Florida citrus memorabilia — vintage postcards, packing-house photographs, or a piece of grove equipment — for a themed kitchen or breakfast nook vignette
• 🎨 Mat and frame it solo as a standalone piece of early American commercial art, letting the portraiture carry the wall on its own
• 📚 Group it with other Florida-town crate labels — Umatilla\'s own \"Red Warrior\" or \"Indian Warrior\" siblings if you can find them — to build a mini regional collection under one frame
• 🏡 Hang it in a Florida vacation home or lake house as a nod to the state\'s agricultural roots, especially fitting near Lake County or the Ocala National Forest
• 🛋️ Use it as an accent piece in a study or den decorated in warm, earthy Southwestern or Americana tones that echo the label\'s palette
• 🎁 Pair it with a short note on Umatilla\'s history for a personalized gift to a Florida native, genealogy buff, or citrus-industry retiree

🎁 Who Collects These

Crate label collectors are a distinct and dedicated crowd — many hunting specific states, specific packing houses, or specific decades of American commercial art. Florida citrus labels draw their own devoted following among collectors chasing regional agricultural history, and pieces tied to a single small town like Umatilla, with its own documented company history and a run of sibling brands, are especially prized by anyone building a focused Lake County or Central Florida collection. Beyond dedicated label collectors, this piece also appeals to fans of early 20th-century American advertising art, Florida history buffs, genealogists researching families connected to the citrus trade, and anyone drawn to portraiture featuring Native American imagery in vintage commercial design. Interior decorators and vintage-home stylists reach for labels like this one for their bold, ready-made color palette and their built-in conversation-starting history.