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A Cooperative Endeavor
In the early days of the citrus industry, picking and packing the fruit was done by the individual ranchers. The packing was particularly crude. The fruit was piled in the center of the packing shed, and packers sat around the pile hand-sorting the fruit and packing it in wooden boxes. In 1883 A.D. Bishop and “Mac” Peters shipped the first two carloads of local oranges east. Other growers joined them in ‘84. Most small growers, though, were forced to rely on private packing houses and Commission Agents. The first packing house in Orange was built by Andrew Cauldwell around 1881. Originally located on Maple Avenue, the building was moved closer to the Santa Fe tracks in 1889. There were several other private packing houses in Orange in the early days as well. Pixley & Arne opened the second packing house in town in 1882. C.P. Mallory & Co., C.S. Spencer & Son, and E.T. Parker also operated houses in the 1890s and early 1900s. The Harper Fruit Co., founded in 1906, was one of the last private packing houses here; it operated until 1917.
Then there were commission agents -- buyers for large commercial produce houses in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and other large cities. They would contract to sell a grower’s crop, and then took a hefty commission. Any money left over was the grower’s profit for the year. The commission agents were the bane of the early citrus growers, and their tactics prompted the founding of cooperative marketing organizations, beginning with the Orange Growers Protective Union, founded in 1885. The Union forced the commission houses to bargain with the growers, and tried to control distribution to the rest of the nation, so that no one market was flooded with fruit. O.P. Chubb of Orange was one of the first two men sent east by the Union to look after growers’ interests there. But as more and more citrus fruit came onto the market in the 1890s it became harder and harder for growers to market their own crop, and easier and easier for the commission houses to dictate their own terms. Local, cooperative growers’ associations began to spring up around this time, but what was needed was a larger, regional organization to take on the job of marketing Southern California’s growing citrus crop. The answer came in 1893 with the founding of the Southern California Fruit Exchange. The Exchange was made up of other regional growers’ associations which in turn were made up of local packing house associations. Among the seven original members of the Southern California Fruit Exchange was the new Orange County Fruit Exchange, which had its headquarters in Orange.
Harold Brewer (1891-1990) settled in the new Cerro Villa tract above Villa Park in 1923, and lived there until his death. He served as the second president of Villa Park Orchards. In a 1985 interview he recalled: “In the early days, packing and shipping was all done by independents. They would come and either buy your fruit for so much a box -- estimating it on the trees -- or they would pick it and pack it and pay you so much, with them keeping a commission. And it got to be -- if you want it politely -- so many robbers. So the growers had to seek a way to defend themselves. That’s what started the co-ops." Orange’s first cooperative packing house, the Santiago Orange Growers Association (SOGA), was formed in 1893. In the early years, the SOGA would contract with one of the local private packing houses to handle their fruit. In 1899 they built their own packing house, which was replaced in 1918 with a massive facility at 350 S. Cypress (still in use today by the Villa Park Orchards Association).
In 1905 the Southern California Fruit Exchange was reborn as the California Fruit Growers Exchange. Two years later they began their first major advertising campaign, and coined a new brand name for their fruit -- Sunkist. The Sunkist name -- only applied to the top grade of fruit -- became so synonymous with citrus that in 1952 the Exchange changed its name to Sunkist Growers, Inc. Their first advertising campaigns were designed to shift oranges from a specialty item to an everyday part of people’s diet. With help from the Southern Pacific railroad they created a campaign that boosted oranges and sunny California all at the same time. Their slogan was: “Oranges for Health - California for Wealth.” Sunkist was not the only regional marketing organization to serve Southern California growers. The Mutual Orange Distributors (M.O.D.) began in Redlands in 1908, marketing their fruit under the Pure Gold label. There were several M.O.D. houses in the area, including the Orange Mutual Citrus Association (later the Orange Cooperative Citrus Association), and Olive Hillside Groves. The American Fruit Growers company also began handling California citrus in 1918 under their Blue Goose logo. They were a late arrival in Orange, buying out F.R. Valentine’s packing house in 1932. Sunkist Growers and the other cooperative organizations set out to manage every aspect of the citrus industry. By 1944 Sunkist had 56 district sales offices scattered across the country to coordinate their marketing efforts. In 1907 they formed the Fruit Growers Supply Company to sell packing house supplies at a reasonable cost. Eventually the Supply Company even bought its own stands of timber and lumber mills to produce its own boxes.
By the early 1900s, the citrus industry was run on a cooperative basis at almost every level. Cooperative water companies developed irrigation systems. Cooperative fumigation companies helped to protect the groves from the many insect pests that can attack citrus trees. The cooperative packing houses provided the picking crews, trucks to haul the boxes, and the entire fruit packing operation. Finally, the cooperative fruit exchanges marketed the crop across the nation (and later around the world).
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