Vintage 1970s Bloomfield Firewood Crate Label 🔥 Cowboy Snow Cabin Santa Clara For Sale

Size: 11 3/4" x 7 1/2" ~ Little to no wear.

Doesn't this just make you want to put another log on the fire? Snow is coming down at dusk, and a rider in a plaid coat is heading home on a buckskin horse. Ahead of him is a log cabin with yellow light in the windows and smoke curling from the chimney, and a dog is already racing out across the snow to meet him. This is a Bloomfield Farms firewood box label, and these never made it onto a box.

• GENUINE in small spaced letters, over a big FIREWOOD that shades from orange to gold
• A ribbon reading SPLIT OAK & MADRONE LOGS
• 1.15 CUBIC FEET in the lower left corner
• A cream oval at the lower right: BLOOMFIELD FARMS over a farmhouse and rows of crops, ringed by SANTA CLARA VALLEY SINCE 1853
• Along the bottom: ©1978 Bloomfield Farms, California, with a Gilroy ZIP code
• A blue border with a yellow rule, a painted scene with a woman at the cabin door and a boy and a dog heading down the hill, and a faint painter's signature beside the oval that looks like "Wolfe"
• The back is plain paper

The ZIP code in the copyright line belongs to Gilroy, down at the south end of the Santa Clara Valley. The town carries the name of John Gilroy. He was born John Cameron in Inverness-shire, Scotland in 1794, jumped off a ship at Monterey in 1814 as a young sailor, and stayed for good. The town was incorporated in 1868, and its first school went up in 1853, which happens to be the year printed on this label. Today most people know Gilroy for garlic. Every summer the Gilroy Garlic Festival fills the town with fans of "the stinking rose."

Bloomfield is also one of the great old names around Gilroy. It was the home ranch of Henry Miller, the Cattle King. Miller was born Heinrich Albrecht Kreiser in 1827 in Brackenheim, in Germany's Wurttemberg. He worked as a butcher in New York, then sailed for California in 1850 with the name Henry Miller, which he took from a non-transferable steamer ticket. He reached San Francisco with six dollars to his name. In 1858 he teamed up with Charles Lux, and Miller & Lux grew into one of the biggest landowners in the country. At its peak the company owned about 1.4 million acres outright and controlled nearly 22,000 square miles of cattle and farm land across California, Nevada and Oregon. Miller died on October 14, 1916.

He bought much of the old Rancho Las Animas in the late 1850s, and Bloomfield, near where Highways 101 and 25 meet south of Gilroy, became the feeder lot where his herds rested on the long drive from the Central Valley to the San Francisco market. The ranch had a general store, a blacksmith shop and its own railroad shipping station, and the family mansion, built in 1888 with more than forty rooms, burned in 1923. Up on Mount Madonna he had a summer home, and its ruins are still there in what is now Mount Madonna Park. The three concrete silos he built at Bloomfield in 1911 still stand beside Highway 101. His big hay barn, raised in 1891 for the cattle and horses and later used to process the stone fruit grown on his land, is now the Miller Red Barn at Christmas Hill Park. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 26, 2016.

By the late 1970s a box of firewood with a painting on it was a real selling point, and Bloomfield Farms dressed its boxes with real illustration. Collectors tell of a second design in the same line that shows a family gathered around a cabin fireplace. The story among collectors is that the painter was Bruce Wolfe of Piedmont, California, and the faint "Wolfe" beside the oval fits that story. Wolfe started out as an art director at Foote, Cone & Belding, went freelance in the early 1970s painting for Levi's, Gallo and Henry Weinhard, and later became a sculptor. The San Francisco Chronicle called him "the top sculptor for hire in the Bay Area, and maybe the nation," and among the people he cast in bronze were Tony Bennett, Clint Eastwood and Gavin Newsom.

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! It looks great framed beside a fireplace or woodstove, in a cabin, a den or a man cave, and it makes a perfect gift for a cowboy, a horse lover or anybody from Gilroy and the Santa Clara Valley.

Labels like this are a reminder of a bygone era, and the printing and artwork on them are something special even to this day, in my opinion. Crate labels sit in museum and historical-society collections now, and plenty of collectors hunt them down to keep that history alive. The supply for sale is finite, and nobody is printing more. Once the limited supply for sale is gone and on display with collectors or in galleries, these will be very difficult to Bloomfield Farms Genuine Firewood