Lemon Men's Club Collection

This collection contains photographs, documents, and ephemera related to the history of the citrus industry, chiefly in Southern California. The materials were donated at the request of the Lemon Men's Club for "historical documents covering the California-Arizona citrus industry." A letter to the Huntington Library from H. W. Nixon, chairman of the Lemon Men's Club Citrus Historical Committee, references their cooperative project to collect citrus historical materials beginning in 1958 (see Box 18, Folder 12).

The 880 photographs in the collection include loose prints, some film negatives, and albums with photographs of citrus orchards, citrus fruit (lemons and oranges), workers in the field, packing houses, and citrus fairs, chiefly in Southern California. Several companies show up in the photographs including the California Fruit Growers Exchange, San Dimas Lemon Association, Santa Barbara Lemon Growers Exchange, and the Covina Citrus Association.

The papers, publications, and ephemera date chiefly from the 1890s to the 1950s and include scrapbooks, ledgers, reports, minutes, pamphlets, clippings, promotional materials, and ephemera. These documents relate to a variety of Southern California fruit exchanges and growers and include materials related to the development of the industry including financial ledgers, by-laws and constitutions, minute books, annual reports, circulars and miscellaneous correspondence and financial statements of individual organizations. There are also pamphlets and technical reports related to citrus production, citrus culture, cost analysis, packaging, pest control, and advertising and marketing. Many of the technical documents in the collection were produced by the University of California College of Agriculture Agricultural Experiment Station, Berkeley, California, and the United States Department of Agriculture. There are also typescript oral histories from the late 1920s (Box 17, Folder 4).

Within the collection there are papers and photographs related to Frederick Arthur Little, a citrus grower who helped organize the first Fruit Exchanges, as well as a scrapbook of T. H. Powell, a Sunkist sales manager.