It was a quiet, bucolic setting with dairy cows grazing in fields nearby. One evening when I returned home from work, I noted several large cattle trucks loaded with Holstein milk cows heading out. I wondered where they were going. When I asked my wife, she declared, with tears in her eyes, that she was convinced they were heading to the slaughterhouse. She had been talking to a neighbor who explained that the local dairy industry was in a downward spiral and many of the smaller farms were going out of business.
I became curious as to what was happening. But life got in the way. Time passed, and I retired. Casting about for hobbies to keep me going, I landed upon the idea of capturing the stories about historical subjects that helped shape our local communities we see today. Over the past 20 years, I have written 11 books on different topics and learned a lot as each book came together. The local logging railroads, the local one-room schoolhouses, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the history of Southwestern Oregon Community College, etc., all captured my interest—so I wrote about them.
Now, nearly 50 years after seeing those truckloads of cows heading who knows where somewhere, I decided to tackle the history of the dairy industry in southwestern Oregon. I learned that Coos and Curry Counties were a major supplier of butter and cheese to the California markets in the early twentieth century, and the industry was a large contributor to our local economy. Dairy farms were everywhere along the floodplains of the Coquille and Coos Rivers, and the little community of Langlois in northern Curry County was once called “Dairyville,” because of the large dairy farms that surrounded it.
I found that both large and small creameries and cheese factories were scattered along the banks of the Coquille and Coos rivers and how the riverboats provided a ready transportation system to move the raw milk from the dairies to the factories. They also moved the finished dairy products to the seaports of Bandon and Coos Bay for export to San Francisco and points west. I learned that the dairy farmers along the Coquille River preferred the Jersey cow for milk production while the farmers along the Coos River preferred the Holstein.
Curds and Whey also delves into the battles between butter and margarine.
And the battles between Tillamook and Coos counties for market share.Note the steep drop-off in the number of dairy cows in Oregon as the country fell into the Depression. Coos and Curry Counties followed the trend, while Tillamook County reversed it.
Fire a constant companion in the production of commercial dairy products. On August 8, 1950, the Arago Cooperative Cheese Association factory was destroyed by fire. The loss was estimated at more than $45,000.
Creameries and cheese factories could not exist without dairy farmers, so Lansing detours and documents several of the major dairy farmers in our area. Farmers such as Anson Rogers long with his son Anson O. and brother Stephen, Sarah Anson Yoakam, Donald McIntosh and James and Sarah McCloskey, Benjamin F. Ross and many others.
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