Creamery, a town's best friend

FAIRFIELD'S NEW INDUSTRY (1903)

Creamery a Benefit to All Classes – Improved Trade

-- From the Laurel Review, published in the Indiana Historical Society archives

Fairfield is proud, and well may be, of her new industry – a creamery. It is a branch of a larger one at Liberty and is the joint property of a group of farmers who began, a few years ago, in a small way and soon found the business profitable. The branch at Fairfield has not yet been established a month, but farmers are eagerly supplying it with milk, and it is said, many more cows will be maintained hereafter.

The system in vogue is for the farmers to deliver their milk each morning and be credited with whatever butter fat the “run” contains after being put through a separator. When the new milk is unloaded, a tiny dipper with an upright handle is dipped into the can and a sample of the milk is put in a glass jar labeled with the farmer's name.

At stated periods the contents of the jars are tested and the percentage of butter fat arrived at. It is said that thus far farmers are getting about equal to 22 cents for their milk product, where before they received from 12 to 17 cents in the form of home-made butter and the trouble of churning, working, etc., is dispensed with.

It should be stated that about 80 per cent of the milk, after being run through the separator, is returned to the farmer for use in feeding, etc.

And no one is better pleased with the new arrangement than are the Fairfield local merchants. With the natural trade rivalry that exists and the desire to pay the best price possible for produce, money has been lost, not made, by them in handling butter, at least so say four of the five in business there.

Now, every morning the farmers or some of their family come to town in great numbers and the effect on trade is already perceptible. The public square of half a block in the heart of the village has been fenced in with a rack for tying horses on all four of its sides, and for a time each morning this whole space is filled.

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By spring 1903, the creamery was well-established in Fairfield, according to the newspapers of the day.

More about the creamery as a cooperative enterprise. The concept was gaining traction as early as the late 1800s but required enough cows, so to speak, to make the business practical. A large creamery sprang up in Brookville in 1906, fueled by Cincinnati investment.

The creamery also produced ice, which had significant practical applications for more than just the dairy industry. I believe the creamery was in a spot between the Town Hall and the Mercantile building on Main Street. 

Stories said the building had been owned by Aaron Miller. A man named Bert (Burt) Clark was considered a spokesman, and he may have been the principal owner or manager of the operation, both in Fairfield and Liberty. 

Henry McMahon was also listed as a principal spokesman when a creamery operation was being planned in Brookville. Joseph McMahon was named in a separate story for having produced a robust amount of milk from 11 cows for the operation. McMahons lived in the Jersey area north of Fairfield. Elwood and C.R. Dare were named in other stories as participating farmers.

The Brookville operations were run by the French Brothers, who managed a much larger operation. One assumes there was some commercial interaction with the Fairfield-Liberty business. One of the French stations was destroyed by fire in 1911.

I don't know when the creameries stopped being profitable. 

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Addendum: Fencing in the town square -- an image that isn't easy to forget. Watch where you walk!

The worst floods

The whole of this blog is dedicated to a community that ceased to exist so that others would suffer less. In a sense, we are grateful that America was able to at least attempt to accomplish it. Early blog items from 2015 will explore this story in detail. This is just a sample of what we knew from the great floods of 1913, 1937 and 1959. There were other floods. In 1913, the first-worst news was the Omaha tornado. They didn't know that was probably the best news they'd get all week. 

Politics of 1868 -- robust times

During the presidential campaign of 1868, U.S. Rep. George Washington Julian spent time in a lot of small towns in support of the Ulysses S. Grant candidacy, which opposed Democrat Andrew Johnson's party. Johnson had been controversial as Lincoln's VP who took over after Lincoln was assassinated.

Julian was also scheduled to appear at Old Bath but had gotten ill and missed that meeting. He was pretty flimsy at his Fairfield stop, though. But he did speak.

Julian

The Brookville American was a chief Republican mouthpiece and missed no chance of boosting the GOP in its run to prominence in the years of reconstruction of the South after the Civil War.

This bit appeared on Aug. 21, 1858:

We are informed that Hon. Geo. W. Julian's address at Fairfield last Wednesday evening was a success, although the gentleman was laboring under manifest disability on account of his health. Some two hundred were present, among them quite a number of ladies. If nothing more was effected than the calling out of a reply on last Saturday evening from the Hon. C.R. Cory, that was enough to compensate for the labor of Mr. Julian.

On Saturday evening, “the faithful” with some few Republicans, to the number of forty persons in all, came together to hear the Honorable C.R.'s speech. To say that it was a failure, would not do justice to the thing, and yet amid the snoring of several sleepers, C.R. continued his dry and flat speech, worming his way through an effort, which from the manner of delivery and everything he said, seemed to give evidence that he did not believe it himself.

Cory was a prominent Fairfielder who was seeking election to the state legislature. He succeeded.

Another snippet from the American said this about Horatio Seymour, who was Grant's chief rival in the presidential election:

Seymour's physicians say he is likely to become crazy within a year. If he has any hopes of defeating Grant he is crazy already.

Seymour

Julian is considered one of the framers of the platform that created the Republican party out of the Whig party. Strongly pro-union, the GOP controlled the White House with almost unanimous clout until Woodrow Wilson won in 1914.

Seymour was not necessarily a “Southern” Democrat (he was from New York) but he did oppose Reconstruction and was a states rights politician, which dominated the Democrat agenda at the time. With passing years, that political platform no longer mattered.

Julian (1817-1899) was from Centerville in Wayne County. He is known for having introduced a women's suffrage bill in 1868 that did not pass. Later on, he became a critic of the Grant administration and a few years later, switched his allegiance to the Democratic party. It is likely he associated with Brookville author Gen. Lew Wallace. Julian's position on Lincoln was that Abe wasn't tough enough on the slavery issue.

The American wrote in October 1868 that the newly emerging Ku Klux Klan was solidly pro-Seymour. At the time, it was just loud squawking. The Democrat-leaning paper of the time isn't in the archives.

2015 BLOG PIECE ON CORY

Zachariah Ferguson

 Doctor, businessman, social organizer, lodge guru -- Zachariah had it all in the 1860s.

He owned the Grant House, the hotel named in honor of the man who was running for President that year. Then he sold the hotel to L.B. Doyle, who was in the army that Grant defeated. Name that tune, boys.

Ferguson was one of the first directors of the Three-County Asylum for the Poor, located north of Blooming Grove, in the 1830s. Much of the background on these topics is covered in the blog. 

LINKS THAT HELP

THE HOTEL

POOR FARM

LODGE LIFE

Newspaper ads from 1867-68

 

News briefs from the 1860s

 Brookville American items about Fairfield residents and their businesses:

News from long ago

 The 1868 Brookville American published these news items about the Universalist (left) and Fairfield Methodist Church. The Universalist church didn't last long after this. It was destroyed by fire and left little history. Church activities were a big deal in the small outpost villages.