Crate Label: Deer Valley Brand Vegetables, Buck Head, Arrowhead Ranches, Glendale Arizona, 1940s

A handsome buck gazes out from a golden circle framed by irrigated fields and desert mountains on this Deer Valley vegetable label — one of the classic Arizona designs built to stand apart from rival California brands.

• Brand: Deer Valley
• Produce: Vegetables
• Lithographer: Louis Roesch Co., San Francisco, California (est. 1879)
• Packing House / Grower: Arrowhead Ranches, Inc.
• Materials: Lithographed paper
• Dimensions: 6.75 x 4.5 in
• Origin: Glendale, Arizona, USA
• Era: 1940s
• Condition: Excellent, New Old Stock — never applied to a crate. Please review photos closely before purchasing, as all sales are final.

Warehouse stock, never used: the green fields and mountain palette are bright and unfaded.

Louis Roesch Co. was founded in San Francisco by its namesake, a German immigrant that arrived in the US in 1872 and has been printing fine California labels since 1879.  After his death in 1916, his son, Louis Roesch, Jr succeeded him until his death in 1959. The company was well known for their detailed multi-colored labels for crates, bottles and canned foods as well as wine labels. They closed their doors in 2003.  This is one of their most graphically striking surviving examples.

Arrowhead Ranches, Inc. packed vegetables out of Glendale, part of central Arizona's Salt River Valley, where subsidized irrigation from the Salt River Project turned the desert into productive farmland for carrots, lettuce, and other row crops in the early twentieth century. The name comes directly from the real Deer Valley area north of Phoenix, and like many Arizona growers of the era, the brand leaned on a distinctly Western identity — wildlife, mountains, and open ranch land — to distinguish its produce from the flood of competing California labels arriving at the same East Coast auction houses.

A handsome piece for anyone building a collection of Southwestern or Arizona agricultural history.

Pairs well with our other Arizona and Salt River Valley crate labels.