Florida Citrus Art

By Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
September 24, 2019

We don’t always think of food labels as art but the current Friends of the Library (FOL) exhibit in the community room of our library will give you a different view. It’s a traveling exhibit of labels used to identify various producers of citrus products in Florida. The exhibit contains framed labels and examples of citrus crates and the cardboard boxes that replaced them. There is an explanatory photo on the history and usage of the labels.

Before the labels appeared, produce was simply crated up and shipped. Labels helped differentiate producers. They were placed on the ends of the crates and are roughly 9 inches square in design. The labels depicted Florida animals, flowers, landscapes, people, landmarks, produce, and occasionally relatives. Labels were in use until the 1960s. Most of the citrus shipments after that time were concentrates rather than whole fruit so crates were unnecessary.

Seeing the exhibit reminded me that I have a cookbook that featured citrus and non-citrus crate labels. The Junior League of Orlando published the cookbook in 1999. The first page of each section (appetizers, desserts, etc.) has a label and some information on the producer. One of the sections shows a label for celery, indicating that the labels were used on non-citrus produce as well.

The exhibits are complemented by plant arrangements from the Bartram Garden Club. These arrangements feature citrus in artful groupings with flowers and other objects. Bartram is a local garden club started in 2016 and affiliated with the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs. The club’s mission is to promote the love of gardening and the appreciation of floral design. In the latter, they succeeded admirably as their contribution to the citrus label exhibit demonstrates.

To find out more about the labels and their history, you can visit www.floridamemory.com. This site contains photos and other memorabilia of Florida through the years. If you enter “citrus labels” in the Search box, you will see photos of the various labels used by Florida growers. None of these appear to be duplicates of the FOL exhibit. The Florida Memory site points at the Florida Museum of History, which has two traveling exhibits of citrus labels. One of these is the exhibit at our library.

The exhibit at the library is open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, from 2 to 4 pm. It will be there until the end of the year.

Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. Evelyn is vice-chair on the Amelia Center for Lifelong Learning and is on the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.