Vintage 1940s Capital Pak Crate Label 🏛️ from Sacramento, California

Remember Capital Pak? 🏛️ Vintage 1940s Crate Label From Sacramento, California

Size: 12 3/4 x 4 inches ~ Little to slight wear.

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The California State Capitol lit up at night under a deep blue sky, gold dome and all, with CAPITAL PAK in big three-dimensional yellow letters running beside it. This is one of the best-looking long strip labels I carry, and it's a real piece of Sacramento: the fruit house was in Sacramento, the building on it is in Sacramento, and the company that printed it got its start in Sacramento. New Old Stock, never pasted on a crate.

🏛️ What's on it

"Produce of U.S.A." in the upper corner, the Capitol with its trees and palms, CAPITAL PAK, CALIFORNIA arched over a gold-rimmed shield reading LAMBERT MARKETING CO., and "Main Office, Sacramento, Calif." Down in the corner in tiny type is the printer's mark, "Crocker-Union, S.F."

📅 How old is it?

That little printer's mark does the dating. H.S. Crocker & Co. bought the Union Lithograph Company in 1922, and the two ran under the Crocker-Union name from 1936 to 1946, so this label came off the press in that ten-year window, right in the heart of the crate label years.

🍐 Lambert Marketing Company

Lambert Marketing Company was incorporated in California on January 12, 1931, under William A. Lambert, with R.V. Lambert as president. Despite the name, they really did pack fruit. The company was headquartered in Sacramento, later West Sacramento, sourced Bartlett pears from growers in El Dorado County, and packed apricots and cherries too. Their "Big City" pear brand was first used in 1931, and by 1936 they had a packing house down in San Jose on Bassett Street. They were already shipping California Bartletts clear to Illinois by the summer of 1932; a federal food case over 632 boxes of their pears that August is one of the oldest papers the company left behind.

🖨️ The Crocker family, printers

The printer has a great Sacramento story of its own. Henry Smith Crocker (1832–1904) followed the Gold Rush to California, settled in Sacramento and opened his printing business there in 1856. His brother was Charles Crocker, one of the "Big Four" behind the Central Pacific Railroad, and Henry got rich almost overnight through his ties to the railroad before he moved to San Francisco in 1871. By the 1930s the Crocker-Union shop in San Francisco was turning out crate labels like this one.

🏛️ The Capitol on the label

The building took fourteen years. Work started in 1860 on a design by Miner Frederick Butler, who won the competition and a $1,500 prize, with Reuben Clark as supervising architect. The winter floods of 1861–62, and again in 1868, were so bad that the first floor was buried to make today's basement and the ground floor was raised. Clark was relieved in 1865 after five years of political fights and intense strain, and the story told around Sacramento is that the job drove him out of his mind. Five architects in all had a hand in it before the Legislature finally met in its new chambers on December 6, 1869, and the last interior work wrapped up in 1874.

A century later it was in trouble. A 1971 seismic report said it couldn't survive a strong earthquake, and instead of building a new one, California restored the old Capitol from 1976 to 1982 as the state's big Bicentennial project. So the building on this label is the same one you can walk through today.

🏡 Display

Long and skinny, it's perfect over a doorway, a window or a kitchen cabinet run. Great for anybody from Sacramento, anyone who works at the Capitol, or a California history wall.

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. There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections and galleries, they will be very hard to track down for sale.