Vintage 1980s Cotton Top Table Grapes Crate Label 🍇 from Tulare, California

How Young Can a Crate Label Be? 🍇 Vintage 1980s Cotton Top Table Grapes Label, Tulare, California

Size: 12" x 4" ~ Little to no wear.

This is one of the youngest crate labels I carry, and one of my favorites for pure charm. A towheaded little farm boy in denim overalls and a plaid shirt, resting under a tree and holding up a big bunch of dark grapes, with vineyard rows, a fence and a barn behind him. That's your "Cotton Top," and he's about as sweet a piece of California farm advertising as you'll find.

🍇 What's on it

COTTON TOP and TABLE GRAPES across the top, a space for the NET WT., and along the bottom: "Product of U.S.A. Tulare, CA 93291. Grown by Shannon Farms." It's the long, narrow strip-style label that went on the end of a grape lug.

"Cotton top" is old country talk for a kid with hair so blond it's nearly white, and that's exactly who they put on the label. I love when a brand name is just a description of the picture.

👨‍🌾 Shannon Farms and Tulare County

Shannon is a big farming name in Tulare County. The family story starts with Carlton James Shannon, who came over from Ireland to the Kettleman Hills on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. It was desert then. In his great-grandson's words, "he had a vision that it could be fertile farm ground and he turned it into fertile farm ground." A C.J. Shannon & Sons still does business in Tulare, and four generations on, the Shannons run their operation out of Visalia, growing table and wine grapes along with citrus, walnuts, almonds, cotton and more. You run into the name all over the county. Over in Tulare, Shannon Bros. runs trucks hauling fruit, milk, walnuts, almonds and wine grapes, and the Tulare County Farm Bureau gives out Scott Shannon Memorial Scholarships to agriculture majors who attend a Visalia school.

Look closely at the address, too. The label says Tulare, but 93291 is actually a Visalia ZIP code, the county seat just up the road, right where the Shannon family headquarters today.

🌊 Tulare, and the lake that keeps coming back

Tulare takes its name from Tulare Lake, which was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, around 690 square miles of water fed by the Kings, Kaweah, Tule and Kern rivers. The Yokuts people lived around it for thousands of years. Starting in the mid-1800s, settlers dammed and diverted those rivers to irrigate farms, and by the early 1900s the lake was gone, turned into some of the richest farmland in the country. That's the ground grapes like these came from.

But the lake doesn't stay gone. It came back in 1983, again in 1998, and in 2023, after a winter of big storms, more than 114,000 acres of the old lakebed went back under water. They call it the "phantom lake" now.

📅 How old is it?

The two-letter "CA" and the five-digit ZIP were both Post Office introductions of 1963, so this label is no older than that, and everything about the art and printing says 1980s. It's a late survivor of the crate-label era, which mostly ended once printed cardboard cartons replaced the wooden crate with a paper label on the end.

🏡 Display

A great one for a farmhouse kitchen, a kid's room, or anybody with grape growers in the family. It's long and skinny, so it frames up beautifully over a doorway or a window.