Places
Muirson’s Customers
Paradise
Valley Brand Apricots, Bisceglia Bros. Canning Company, c. 1925. The Muirson Label Company was by and large the first choice for canning companies in the Santa Clara Valley. It was the only printer in the Valley and so offered convenient, personalized service to the small, family-owned canning companies that flourished in the early 20th century. Bisceglia Brothers Company was typical of Muirson’s local customers. Founded by four Italian immigrant brothers in Morgan Hill in1902, the company grew steadily and expanded into a new facility that was the largest cannery in the world in 1919, employing over 1000 workers.
The 1910’s and 1920’s witnessed an intensive consolidation of small canning and growing operations into large companies and associations capable of competing in the national market. Muirson was the exclusive printer for the Santa Clara Valley Pear Association, a growers’ cooperative. The company also printed labels for the California Packing Corporation (or CalPak, later called Del Monte), a conglomerate of several smaller canneries and cannery associations founded in 1916.
Less well-known, at least to their Valley neighbors, were Muirson’s non-agricultural clients. With offices in Illinois and New York, and customers throughout the nation, Muirson created labels for a wide variety of products. These included fish, meat, and a few “surprising believe-it-or-nots”, as Ralph Rambo called them: “labels for plain drinking water in cans (for survival kits), canned whale meat, contraceptive cartons and indoor and outdoor plant fertilizer – bluntly horse manure.”
