Days gone by and making milk and cheese available

Long before silly people decided there must be teensy teats on almonds and soybeans the standard source of milk, cheese and other dairy products was cattle.?ÿ Sure, some people kept goats for their preferred dairy source, but that's a different story.?ÿ?ÿ

A few days ago my nephew proudly showed me his most recent acquisition.?ÿ It was similar to what you see in the two photos below.

He spent over a decade driving a modern semi-truck with bulk milk tank hauling milk from numerous dairies to a processing plant in southwestern Missouri.?ÿ He collects any kind of memorabilia tied to the dairy industry.?ÿ The ten-gallon milk can he showed me was basically identical to the one shown.?ÿ It had a brass tag very similar to the one shown except that the producer/collector name and location was within 10 miles of where his mother and I grew up.?ÿ He wanted to know if I had ever heard of Beardslee Produce (the collector) and Blue Valley Creamery (the processor).?ÿ I had not heard of Beardslee but I had heard of the Blue Valley Creamery.?ÿ I told him I would do my best to find the exact owner and the location of Beardslee Produce in the little town identified on the tag.?ÿ That has been a fun adventure so far.

The Blue Valley Creamery consisted of many locations across Missouri, Kansas and a couple other states.?ÿ It came into existence about 1911 and operated until about 1939 when it was purchased by the Borden corporation.?ÿ During that period there were literally thousands of tiny dairy farms across the region in need of buyers for their production.?ÿ Rural electrification was not common so the product had to be moved fairly quickly to places where refrigeration equipment could operate.?ÿ On the farm the primary source of cooling was provided by water from wells held in tanks or barrels where the 10-gallon metal milk cans could be placed to drop the temperature of the milk from roughly 100 F to around 55 F year around.?ÿ In summertime the water would be drained and refilled as needed to keep the water temperature as cool as possible.?ÿ A typical situation was that the farmer would then transport, or hire someone else to transport, the cans of their milk to a nearby railroad station.?ÿ Numerous cans from numerous little dairies would then be loaded on a train headed towards the processing plant.?ÿ At the processing plant notes were made as to exactly how much milk came from each dairy/collector, based on the tags, then dumped, the cans rinsed and then loaded onto a train headed in the direction of those dairies.?ÿ The farmer or collector would then return to the local railroad station to gather the empty cans for reuse.

Eventually, the processing plants used box trucks and their own employees to go from farm to farm gathering the milk cans.?ÿ Thus, the use of the railroad was eliminated and the travel time to the plant reduced.?ÿ Each day the box truck would arrive at the farm to drop off the empty cans from the day before and to pick up those filled in the meantime.?ÿ The little collectors, typically produce stores in nearby small towns, were no longer needed.?ÿ The brass tags gave way to can numbers painted or stamped on each can that uniquely identified the source.?ÿ For example, on our little farm in the 1950's and early 1960's the unique number was 2469 and the processor was Pet Milk Company.

Later today I hope to hear back from a friend after he meets with his 92 year-old father to discuss Beardslee Produce.?ÿ The father grew up four miles from where that store operated and almost definitely would have observed his parents doing business there.?ÿ He may be 92 but his memory is superb.?ÿ My search for anyone named Beardslee living in that community between 1930 and 1940 turned up only one family.?ÿ They had a son who would have been nearly the same age as my friend's father.

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