Valley Falls Orange Crate Label Magnet

Display a piece of vintage art on a 2 inch square magnet. This magnet is adorned with the Valley Falls Brand orange crate label with a large image of an orange and leaves in front of an orange grove landscape. The design has been enlarged to fill the entire print area to stylize the label design. If you wish to see the whole label, click "Customize It!" and use the controls to size the art to your liking. A little history of the Fruit Crate Label From around 1880 to 1940, the western United States experienced decades of intense competition among fruit growers to create the most colorful, artistic and eye catching paper crate labels used to identify their citrus fruit crates. German immigrants combined their printing and illustration skills to create fruit crate commercial art unsurpassed anywhere in the world. German Americans for decades had been using lithography to create labels for wine bottles. California orange growers and shippers adapted the wine label concept to a larger format and fruit crate labels were born. Originally, the process used to create the labels was and is known as stone lithography, where the illustration was etched directly on a piece of limestone; a process requiring great talent and skill. Fruit crate labels from the 1880's through the 1920's were mostly produced by this stone lithographic process. More modern printing techniques were used after this period until the 1940's and 1950's when wooden crates and labels were mostly replaced with preprinted cardboard boxes. Today, fruit crate labels are highly collectible and recognized as an outstanding example of commercial art and illustration from a bygone era.