California Pine Box Distributors
California Pine Box Distributors was a California-based cooperative supplying box-making materials to canneries throughout the west. Western Canner and Packer declares it had 22 members ranging from Klamath Falls to Central California. The company appears to have worked with multiple lumber mills
The company existed as late as 1961.
In 1922, the company produced 10,000 cars of output, 250,000 feet of shook, and 80,000,000 boxes, That work represented 7% of the entire manufacturing output of California. Canned goods were responsible for twelve million boxes, dried fruit 12.5 million, cantaloupes six million, and wine grapes twenty million. Between three hundred and five hundred carloads of shook was shipped to the Imperial Valley. In 1922, the company had distribution sites in Sacramento, San Jose, Watsonville, Fresno, Los Angeles, Brawley.
|Sacramento||1938||1401 Front St.|
|San Francisco||1919||1019 First National Bank Building<ref>Advertisement, April 26, 1919 California Fruit News.|
|San Jose||1917||353 North San Pedro Street|
Sacramento branch, 1401 Front Street. Via Sacramento Room, Sacramento Public Library.
- Magnitude of the Box Shook Industry: February 1923 Western Canner and Packer. "... organized along the same lines as the co-operative fruit producers of the State..."
- California Pine Box Distributors vs. Southern Pacific Co. et. al, California Railroad Commission case #2403, decision #21081, case #2403, decided May 11, 1929. The case explicitly demands refunds for lumber shipped from multiple different sites owned by different lumber companies.
- Cantaloupe Crates in California: July 1921 The Packages magazine. "...California Pine Box Distributors, which buys shook from all the lumber mills of California and Oregon, and, by handling the crate demand of California as a unit, is efficiently able to meet the shook requirements of each crop."
- Truhe Box Company vs. Jandrew: Court of Civil Appeals of Texas, San Antonio, 346 S.W.2d 430 (1961), April 19, 1961. The lawsuit argued over the ownership of boxes produced by California Pine Box Distributors and shipped from California to Texas.
- California Pine Box Distributors photo. Sacramento Room, Sacramento Public Library.