Vintage 1930s Ramona Memories Lemon Crate Label 🍋 San Fernando Heights Assn CA For Sale

🍋 Original 1930s Ramona Memories Lemon Crate Label — San Fernando Heights Lemon Association

Offered to collectors of California citrus crate labels and Los Angeles history: an original Ramona Memories brand lemon crate label of the San Fernando Heights Lemon Association, San Fernando, Los Angeles County, California, dating to the 1930s. It is described from the sheet itself and from the documented history of the Association; price, quantity and listing status are as set in the listing. This is a genuine period label in unused New Old Stock condition, offered exactly as pictured.

🏭 The Grower: San Fernando Heights Lemon Association

The label's owner was a real and well-documented cooperative. The San Fernando Heights Lemon Association was formed in 1915 by San Fernando Valley lemon growers, who pooled their fruit and purchased a packing plant built around 1911 by the Pacific Packing Company, sited just south of Mission San Fernando. The 1913 opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct had made large-scale Valley agriculture possible, and the co-op grew with the industry: it constructed a major packing building in 1922 and added a three-story structure in 1936, employing at its late-1940s peak roughly 80 house workers alongside about 100 field pickers. Notable episodes in its record include a 1936 program of painting the plant machinery in bright colors (violet, mustard yellow, peacock blue) to improve morale, an August 1938 labor strike drawing about 1,000 picketers, and a 1950 arrangement leasing the plant to Hollywood studios for filming. Post-war suburban expansion and shrinking lemon acreage brought the operation to a close. Ramona Memories is documented as one of the Association's brands in museum collections (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Calisphere, LACMA).

🌹 The Brand and Its Imagery

The design centers on a young woman in Spanish-California costume — dark hair, a red rose behind the ear and a second at the shoulder, a hoop earring, a green shawl printed with red roses over a red bodice, one hand raised to the chest. A large oval vignette at left frames a sunlit mission courtyard: yellow adobe walls, an arcade of arches, a tiled roof, a bell in an arched opening, open sky above. "RAMONA MEMORIES" arcs across the top; the Association's name and "Reg. U.S. Pat. Off." run along the lower edge. The Ramona theme derives from Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel, the source of the mission-and-señorita imagery Southern California citrus packers used widely in this period to market their fruit on romantic "old California" associations.

🎨 Format and Dimensions

A full-size horizontal citrus crate label measuring approximately 12¼ by 9 inches — the standard end-label format pasted to the end panel of a wooden lemon crate. The image is complete to the printed border.

📦 Condition Report

• Type: Original period lithographed lemon crate label; not a reproduction.
• Status: New Old Stock — never applied to a crate.
• Reverse: Clean blank cream stock with faint show-through of the front ink, consistent with an unused label stored flat.
• Front: Bright, saturated color; image whole and clear to the borders.
• Wear: Some honest edge wear as shown in the photographs; no significant loss to the image.
• Overall: A genuine, attractive, displayable example, offered exactly as pictured.

🖼 Era Note: Why Unused Labels Survive

Briefly, for context: crate labels were the brand identity of fruit shipped in wooden crates, ordered by packing houses in bulk. When the wooden crate gave way to the pre-printed cardboard carton in the years around and after World War II, surviving label stock was set aside unused, and those warehouse holdings are the source of most New Old Stock labels today. This sheet is one such survivor, which is why it presents bright and unused with a blank back.

🏡 Collecting Context

Ramona- and mission-theme citrus labels are a well-established Southern California collecting category, and labels attributable to a specific, documented Los Angeles County packing association — here with a colorful institutional history — carry added interest for both crate-label specialists and regional-history collectors. As original period commercial art the label is also frame-ready wall decor.

📚 Display and Care

The label displays well framed as vintage graphic art, alone or grouped with other citrus labels. As an unused period sheet it needs no restoration; keep it flat, out of direct sun and away from damp, ideally under UV-filtering glass with acid-free materials. Any framing or conservation is at the buyer's discretion.

🎁 The Cooperative Packing System Behind the Label

To place the grower accurately: California citrus reached the national market through grower cooperatives. Individual growers pooled their fruit into a local packing association, which graded, wrapped, boxed and labeled it and shipped it east through the larger citrus exchange system. The San Fernando Heights Lemon Association was one such local association, its packing plant (built about 1911, purchased by the growers in 1915) sited just south of Mission San Fernando and enlarged in 1922 and 1936. Each association ran a catalogue of brands that let it grade and differentiate its pack; the documented record notes that this Association's brands included several transferred from the earlier Pacific Packing Company — Silver Moon, Blue Moon, Evening Star and Southern Cross — and, as museum holdings confirm, Ramona Memories. This label therefore represents a specific, documented link in the Los Angeles County citrus economy of the 1930s.

💛 Reading an Original From the Images

Originality is assessable directly from the photographs. The reverse is bare, uncoated cream stock bearing only faint show-through of the front ink — the expected state of an unused period sheet stored flat, distinct from the bright coated back of a modern reproduction. The face shows layered lithographic ink on aged paper rather than a uniform digital dot-screen. The edges carry light, genuine handling wear consistent with age, and the sheet is the true full-format citrus end-label trade size. These points are visible in the imagery, which is the definitive record.

❓ Collector Notes

Ramona- and mission-theme Southern California citrus labels are an established collecting sub-category, and examples attributable to a specific, documented Los Angeles County association carry added interest for regional-history collectors. Institutional examples of this exact brand are held by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Calisphere and LACMA, which both confirms the attribution and situates the present unused sheet as a private-hands survivor of a museum-catalogued brand. Condition is a straightforward matter here: an unused sheet with a blank back and only honest edge wear, requiring no restoration.

🏙 The Ramona Theme in Southern California Citrus

The brand belongs to a documented marketing tradition. Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel Ramona produced a durable regional iconography — señoritas, red roses, mission arches and courtyards, sun-warmed adobe — that Southern California citrus packers adopted widely to sell fruit on romantic "old California" associations, particularly as the industry matured in the 1920s and 1930s. Ramona Memories is one such brand, and its imagery is textbook: the costumed young woman with the rose, set against the framed mission-courtyard vignette. For the collector, that places the label squarely within the Ramona/mission sub-category, one of the most recognizable and pursued groupings in California citrus-label collecting, and gives it thematic value beyond the specific Association that issued it.

✨ Attribution and References

The attribution rests on documented sources. Ramona Memories is recorded as a San Fernando Heights Lemon Association brand in institutional collections including the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Calisphere and LACMA, and the Association's own history — its 1915 formation, its packing plant south of Mission San Fernando, and its later closure — is documented in San Fernando Valley local-history sources. The present sheet is a private-hands, unused example of that catalogued brand. Nothing in this description is speculative as to the grower or the brand; where the historical record is specific, it is followed, and no maker, printer or exact year beyond the documented 1930s period is claimed on the sheet itself.

🍋 The Valley After the Groves

A closing note on legacy, relevant to the label's standing as a historical artifact: the San Fernando Valley that supported this cooperative has been almost entirely transformed. The water that the 1913 Los Angeles Aqueduct brought first created the lemon groves and then, indirectly, doomed them — the same growth that made the Valley farmable made its land far more valuable for housing, and in the post-war decades the groves gave way to residential and commercial development, closing packing houses like this one. As a result, comparatively little survives of the Valley's citrus era beyond documents, photographs and labels. That scarcity of surviving physical evidence is part of what gives a clean, attributable label like this its interest to Los Angeles regional-history collectors, over and above its value as citrus-label graphic art.

🏭 Summary

A genuine 1930s Ramona Memories lemon crate label of the San Fernando Heights Lemon Association, Los Angeles County, California — a documented grower cooperative with a notably colorful history — showing a Spanish señorita before a sunlit mission courtyard, unused New Old Stock with a blank back and honest edge wear, approximately 12¼ by 9 inches. A clean, storied, individual example offered exactly as pictured; please review all photographs, which are the definitive record of the item.