Walkabout: The Great Milk Wars, Part 2

Read Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4 of this story.

In 19th century New York, the war against swill milk was fought with education, legislation and determination, in an effort to stop the sale and use of milk from diseased and malnourished cows fed a diet of distillery mash, the grain by-product of whiskey and other liquor manufacturing. For most of the 19th century, city children, especially poor children, had no other alternative but to drink this thin blue milk, often further altered by unscrupulous vendors, by the addition of starch, eggs, chalk, and even plaster. Contemporary scientists calculated that half of the deaths of children under the age of five in New York City were caused by the bacteria and germs ingested by this contaminated swill milk. The invention of pasteurization, a simple heating of the milk enough to kill the germs and bacteria, saved thousands of lives.

The campaign to bring pasteurized milk to the masses was taken up by the Board of Health, aided by concerned society folk, including Nathan Straus, the wealthy and influential founder of W. H. Macy’s and Brooklyn’s Abraham and Straus. He paid for dozens of Milk Depots across the entire city, where mothers and their children could receive advice on food preparation, nutrition, medical care, and plenty of good, pasteurized and pure milk. Other kinds of milk depots and sources of pure milk also appeared in the city, including the working dairies in both Prospect Park and Central Park. See Part One of this series for more details. A 1913 typhoid epidemic, carried by contaminated milk, finally convinced everyone in NYC that pasteurization was necessary, and it became law in 1914. Refrigeration and tough processing standards to kill bacteria eventually gave NYC the safest milk supply in the world, and set the standard for the rest of the country.

The need for fresh milk and dairy products in this large growing city made the business of milk a large and lucrative business, indeed. There would be fierce competition among rival companies to be the best, to have the largest customer base, and be the most profitable entity. One of the best ways to make more profit is to lower your costs, and by the 1930’s, the competition among the three largest milk companies was about to come to a head. The three companies were Borden’s Condensed Milk, Sheffield Farms, and U.S. Dairy Company.

We tend to think of milk as a rather genteel and benign kind of business, with happy cows, industrious hayseed farmers and laughing children, but that’s from advertising, not reality. The wholesale milk business was, and is, as cutthroat as the oil business, with the major players vying for millions of dollars. Sheffield Farms began when a lawyer named L.B. Halsey married Ann Maria Sheffield, and began to take an interest in her family farm. The farm in Mahwah, NJ had carefully bred cows that produced a superior milk, and therefore superior butter. Mr. Halsey began marketing the butter in his spare time, and by the 1880’s, had given up the law to go into the dairy business, delivering not only his own milk, but buying milk from other farmers to wholesale to New York City and the surrounding area. Perhaps because he was coming to the business from a non-farmer’s perspective, he was more able to be innovative in thinking about new ways to do things. He designed a covered wagon that protected the milk from dust, and trained fellow farmers to improve the quality of their milk, and he bought only from the best herds.

In 1892, he installed the first pasteurizing machine in the US, at his Bloomfield, NJ milk plant. NYC’s own large scale pasteurization programs didn’t take off until 1898, so he was well ahead of the popular wisdom. In 1892, Sheffield Farms merged with T.W. Decker & Sons, an established milk company in business since 1841. Decker had 33 delivery routes and three stores by this time. Thompson Decker was an astute businessman, as well, and is credited as being the first NYC milk dealer to use the railroad to bring his milk into the city from his huge farm in Westchester.

Another very successful milk distributer, Slawson Brothers, under the leadership of Lotus H. Horton, merged with Sheffield and Decker, creating Sheffield Farms-Slawson-Decker, which was eventually called Sheffield Farms, and by 1926 was the largest dairy products company in the world, with almost 2,000 retail routes and over 300 stores, mostly in NYC. Lotus Horton had risen to the post of president of the company, an office he held until his death. Just before he died in 1926, he sold Sheffield to the National Dairy Products Corporation, a company founded in 1923, as a merger of several other dairy firms. Sheffield was their largest holding. They would go on to acquire Breyer Ice Cream in 1926 and Kraft-Phenix Cheese Corporation in 1930. In 1976, National Dairy Products became Kraft.

I wasn’t able to find out too much about the U.S. Dairy Company, except that they were based in NYC, from at least the 1840’s, and were producers of dairy products, such as butter and cheese. In 1874, after buying the patent, they were the first American company to manufacture margarine, then called oleomargarine. Margarine was invented in 1869 by a French chemist named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, who substituted the natural oil butterfat in butter with beef fat oil, which when mixed with milk, would produce a cheaper form of butter. By 1882, the company was producing 50,000 pounds of margarine a day, with over half of that being produced in New York State. That takes a lot of milk.

The most famous company in the Big Three was the Borden Company. Borden was founded by Gail Borden, a dairyman from upstate Norwich, NY. Borden was an odd duck who had spent much of his life travelling and holding odd jobs. He had been a newspaperman, a surveyor and a land agent at one time or another. He was also an inventor, credited with the invention of a sail powered wagon, and most famously, the lazy Susan. He also invented a dried meat biscuit that he hoped could be a staple of long distance plains travel. The biscuit was not the greatest tasting thing, and never caught on, but was recognized as a breakthrough in food, and he was invited to receive a medal at the 1851 London World’s Fair. On his passage back home, he saw several children on board his ship die from drinking contaminated milk. It became his mission to do something about that.

He began experimenting with the vacuum pans used by the Shakers to preserve fruit. He believed the water in milk was causing the spoilage, and by removing it, and canning the milk, it was rendered safe. In actuality, it was the process of heating the milk and killing the bacteria, the basics of pasteurization, that made the milk safe, but his canned milk was an idea worth pursuing. It wasn’t until he partnered with Jeremiah Milbank, a wholesale grocer, banker and railroad financier, that his business took off. It was called the New York Condensed Milk Company, and its first ad in 1858 was in the same issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly that swill milk was roundly condemned. The company was soon delivering condensed milk across New York City and Jersey City, NJ. A contract with the U.S. Army for condensed milk assured the company’s success, and they licensed the condensing process to other manufacturers in order to keep up with orders. After the war, Civil War veterans gave them a new consumer base familiar with the product.

In 1874, Borden died, and his sons took over. They began delivering whole fluid milk in 1875. In 1885, they pioneered the use of glass bottles for milk distribution. In 1899, the company incorporated at the Borden Condensed Milk Corporation, and continued to grow, opening canning facilities, pasteurizing and bottling facilities across NY, NJ and Illinois. World War One gave them further enormous growth and profit, allowing them to go multinational. In 1919, the name was changed to the Borden Company, and by 1930 had acquired more than two hundred companies, becoming the nation’s largest distributor of fluid milk.

There was much more to the milk industry, including the “milk trains” which transported fresh milk to NYC from farms upstate and from New Jersey, in the 19th century. By the 1930’s, milk was the second largest perishable product handled in the NY market. Milk trains arrived in NYC each night, some making trips of over 250 miles. The milk was transported in 40 quart cans. A boxcar could hold 300 cans. Ice was shoveled either at both ends of the car, or directly on top of the cans to preserve it. Borden’s introduced milk tank cars to New York in 1926. They were constructed like a Thermos bottle, and kept the milk at a constant temperature. Most of the milk was processed in the city, where it was pasteurized and bottled. In 1933 there were 12 pasteurizing plants in Manhattan, 2 in the Bronx, and 15 in Brooklyn.

All of this sets the stage for the milk wars of the 1930’s. The nation was in the midst of the Great Depression. Money was tight, and people were angry. The Big Three Milk companies were fighting with each other for supremacy in the market, and squeezing the dairy farmers and milk middlemen, paying them less and less for their product. The New York consumer was caught in the middle, left with no milk. The story of what happened, and how that affected Brooklynites and other New Yorkers will continue next week.