CABOT – The Cabot Creamery that we know today was formed in 1919, but it was not the first Cabot Creamery. The “Cabot Creamery Company” was formed by 90 farmers on June 19, 1893.
The March 9, 1893, “Burlington Free Press” reported: “The citizens of Cabot have raised $3,000 for a creamery to be built in that town.” Creameries were agricultural manufacturing plants where farmers took milk or cream and had it made into butter. By 1915 there were nearly 300 creameries in Vermont.
Farmers deliver their milk to the original Cabot Creamery in 1893.
The August 16, 1893, issue of the “Vermont Watchman” had an article on the new creamery in Cabot: “The creamery was started June 19, less than two months ago, and has been a gratifying success. Ninety farmers now take their milk there and since it was started only three men have thought they could do better with their milk at home after trying the creamery. The building is equipped with a six-horse-power engine, a fifteen-horse-power boiler, a Babcock tester, a Mosley & Stoddard churn with a capacity of 400 gallons of cream, two separators and a Fargo butter worker that will work and salt 200 pounds of butter in four minutes.”
The article noted that the creamery was accepting milk from 600 cows. “The dairies run from one to forty cows.” Harry Walbridge was probably the one-cow dairy and old-timers recalled that he used to take his milk to the creamery in a wheel barrow.
“Figures vary with different days and weeks, but during the first two weeks of August the average product was one pound of butter to twenty pounds of milk,” the article continued. “The best thing about it, every farmer with whom the reporter talked, was satisfied that he got more out of his milk than he would at home, and saved all the trouble of making and shipping butter.”
But, according to the reporter, not everyone was content with the creamery’s operation. “It is said that some, who can find no other cause for complaint, object to the creamery because it is run on Sunday, the same as on week days,” he wrote. “These intense Sabbatarians fail to see that while three men are obliged to work at the creamery on Sunday, if there were not such an institution the hard working wives of the ninety farmers who now take their milk there, after working sixteen hours a day through the week, would be obliged to rise an hour earlier on Sunday morning to skim their milk and wash the pans, if they did not have to churn, to be able to get to church at half-past ten, and by that time be in such a flushed condition and flurried state of mind that the gospel would have little charm or comfort for them.”
Progressive Cabot farmer Luke C. Fisher (who farmed at the former Ken Talbert farm) spoke at a farmers’ meeting in South Ryegate, February 22, 1894, where there were three creameries at the time: “We (Cabot farmers) started a creamery at Cabot last summer, and since that time greater interest has been taken in dairying. It is safe to say the creamery is one of the best things that ever came to our little village.”
The Creamery in Cabot was sold to F.A. Messier for $6,700 in 1911. He owned it for eight years and according to an interview with Bob Davis, general manager of Cabot Creamery for 32 years, Messier had plans to close the creamery down. The farmers who had been delivering to the Cabot Creamery Company bought it back for $3,700 in 1919 and at that point formed a cooperative, the Cabot Farmers Cooperative Creamery. They began producing butter under the Rosedale brand name. The cost to join was $5 per cow, plus a cord of wood to fuel the boiler.
In 1992 the Cabot Farmers Cooperative Creamery merged with Agri-Mark, a cooperative of 1,800 farm families in New England and New York, and was reincorporated as Cabot Creamery Cooperative Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Agri-mark. Cabot Creamery’s headquarters are now in Waitsfield.
Amanda Legare
