In 1890 a man named Ericson bought equipment to start a creamery in Blackfoot. Scheduled to open in June, its success must have been limited, as eight years later he was expecting to open a different creamery if he could find a suitable building to rent. in A site was found near the river, west of the slaughterhouse.
There were barely enough cows in the area to service the creamery though a hundred farmers had signed on, and the quality of the small herds was in doubt. Jerseys and Shorthorns were milked, but a registered Holstein cow cost $350 at the time--about five thousand dollars. Farmers were continually admonished to select good milkers and not just take a beef cow and milk it, yet many no doubt did. Advice columns told beginning dairymen how to milk: work the smaller teats first, they were told, so the udder doesn't become lopsided, and don't grip the teat too tightly lest the friction of the millk close the orifice. It was a new industry.
--a typical cream separator from the early twentieth century.
Bowing to concerns about odors from the slaughterhouse, the proposed Blackfoot creamery site was moved a half-mile closer to town to the east side of "Doud's farm." In April, The Blackfoot Creamery Company incorporated with $3000 in stock, the directors being Ericson, Givens, Capps, Sample, and Christensen. The brick building was being plastered in July and the equipment arrived in August, providing for its opening.
Another creamery opened in Idaho Falls shortly after, one was underway in Rexburg, and yet another in Wolverine, under J.H. Munson's management, was actually re-opening in 1900. Early creameries were doomed to failure in general throughout the U.S., being underfunded and underequipped, and Blackfoot's creamery likewise failed, its building up for sale in 1901 in order to pay its indebtedness.
The Rose creamery, located not at Rose but between Riverside and Moreland, burned down in 1904. Shelley was working on getting a creamery in 1905, intending to gather cream from Basalt, Taylor, Goshen and Presto. An Oregon man--Mr. Morrison--promised to put in the relevant equipment and start the enterprise if local dairymen guaranteed product from 1000 cows. His intent was to only gather the cream and leave the remaining milk for the farmer to feed his pigs or calves. At the meeting to get things underway, "the inevitable funny man" claimed from the audience that many of the local cows wouldn't "give enough cream to grease a pig for a celebration", a retort noting the lack of using a proper breed for dairy purposes. The joker also noted that Dr. French at the university had bred a cow with a locomotive, the result being milk already boiling and free from germs or disease.
A dairy supply rep from Ogden implored the area settlers to increase their herd numbers and better their breeding. There was plenty demand for butter, he said, but if a big company were to buy five or six carloads of butter from here it might find "five thousand different grades" of product. Uniformity of standards would need to be implemented. At the time, both Populists from the prior decade and Progressives from the present one were clamoring for just such legislation for pure food and honest labeling. Oleomargarine was legally being colored and sold as butter, manufacturers substituted glucose for sugar without penalty, stores sold maple syrup which was just yellow sugar and vegetable flavoring, "aged" whiskey might be thirty days old and needn't state whether it was a blend, catsup might be coal tar, pumpkin and vegetable extract, spices and pepper were often ground up nutshells, lard was adulterated with cottonseed oil, fruit jams were composed of just peels, cores, and sugar, and a pound of butter could be stretched into two by adding a chemical thickener and a pint of milk--all of this, without legal repercussion. The Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, passed almost simultaneously with the Federal Meat Inspection Act, went into effect to mitigate those practices. 190 bills had come before Congress since 1860 addressing these problems, with only eight ineffective ones passing and only 141 making it to the introduction phase of legislation. It had been a slow go.
25 states, even in 1880, had some restrictive laws on the books regarding sales of impure or adulterated food and dairy products, alcohol and medicines. Nationwide, the dairy industry especially was strong long before the pure food movement gained steam and was instrumental in passing the food and drug regulations. Among the Pure Food law stipulations was a requirement for butter producers to wrap their product with their name evidently displayed and the weight clearly stated. Twin Falls area authorities closed down meat plants and creameries for having filthy product and establishments in 1909 under the law's authority.
Hailey, Rigby and Darlington opened creameries in the mid 1900s, Rigby's shipping out 2500 lbs. of butter a week with some of its suppliers making as much as $65 a month. Idaho only had 24 public creameries in 1906, their output one million pounds of butter sold at 25 cents a pound. Private dairies accounted for another 1.7 million pounds. 1.4 million pounds of butter were shipped into the state, suggesting room for the dairy industry to grow.
The explosion of creamery numbers nationwide, enabled by refrigerated shipments and the ever-expanding railroad system, spawned anti-corporate sentiment among small producers who had to compete with large entities moving product through the country. The local Blackfoot paper, in 1910, railed against the "creamery shark", the practice of selling separators to small farmers and creameries at triple their value and forcing them to go bankrupt. Beatrice Foods had been distributing separators to farmers on credit for over a decade, selling fifty thousand in Nebraska alone and thereby tying the producer to the company. Antitrust sentiment grew. Idaho's representative Smith called for a government inquiry into the creamery trust and eventually some indictments were handed out, though later aspects of the antitrust charges were thrown out by a higher court which deemed the law's strictures too vague.
Rochelle, just southwest of Sterling, started a creamery in 1912, and Pocatello's Jensen Creamery and Idaho Falls had been running theirs for years, with Jensen's picking up cream at stations in Sterling and at Rockford's Peterson Store. The creameries were still pleading with farmers to use a proper milking breed and the only thriving dairy area in the territory was lamented to be southward, in Cache Valley, where farmers accrued 1.5 million dollars for milk sales in 1913.
American Falls tried to start a creamery in 1915, its equipment and building estimated to cost $5000. W.G. Searles, of Presswich, New York, had exhaustively scouted the country for cows, putting on 1500 miles in the Sterling to American Falls area and figuring on 1000 available milking animals. Twenty-seven entities had stock in the enterprise in May but none had more than two shares. Construction began in July and the creamery opened in August. It went defunct within a year.
An Aberdeen creamery, sharing its space with a barbershop under a tent (a perhaps singular appearance of that business combination), burned in 1917. 1919 saw the Mutual Creamery of Utah start a franchise in Blackfoot by the newspaper office in a 16 x 35 building at 175 West Bridge. It sold a year later. Firth opened a creamery in 1919, too, and the American Falls community attempted to resurrect its creamery in conjunction with an ice plant, which seemingly went hand in hand. They opened in 1921 with a contest to name their butter. The creamery contracted 3000 lbs. of "Sunny Idaho Brand" butter to Swift in early June and sold nearly 5000 pounds two weeks later.
Howell Creamery in Blackfoot stepped into the competition in 1920, then leased its business out within a year, about the same time the American Falls Creamery again went bankrupt--due to locals patronizing outside entities, according to the owners.
Fast forward a century to the present, with Idaho's dairy exports in 2018 totaling $407 million. No doubt early dairymen dreamed about a future of such success but they, like all pioneers, had to do the hard work that marks any beginning and often ends in failure--in effect, setting the stage for the successful but getting little credit.
Ralph Thurston is the author of The Shanghi Plain: Bingham County's Early History, an account of the century long extension of a frontier from the Snake River Plain's edges into its core. Purchase it locally at Kesler's Market and The Idaho Potato Museum, or online at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCCS7XLR?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
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