Road Scholars - Page 13

Construction of a left turn channelization and a climbing lane on State Route 1 through the community of Harmony offered a rare opportunity to review the history of Swiss-Italian cheesemaking along the Central Coast.

Harmony Along the Coast

by Paula Juelke Carr

Cheese Factories

Cheesemaking is a traditional aspect of dairying, but until the mid-nineteenth century each farm was responsible for making its own, the work traditionally performed by the female members of the household or female servants. The shift toward commercial operation - the cheese factory - began in the rich dairy regions of upstate New York. The term "factory" is derived from nineteenth-century usage:

Although everyone called them "factories," these plants did not fundamentally change cheesemaking in the way that, for example, textile factories revolutionized cloth production; methods remained the same, and tools were merely enlarged versions of those that had been used at home. Capital requirements were modest, and these were met by pooling of small contributions made by individual farmers. Early cheese "factories" resembled modern cooperatives more than large-scale capitalist ventures.

The first modern cheese factory in the United States was built in Oneida County in 1851 by Jesse Williams. The factory method of cheesemaking involved the collection of milk or cream from more than one dairy farmer. The liquid was literally pooled together and processed into cheese by a professional cheesemaker, and the profits from the sale of the finished cheese were divided up according to the amount of milk or cream contributed by each farmer.

During the 1850s, cheese factories remained, by and large, a novelty confined to a small section of Oneida County, but interest in them grew over the next two decades. By the mid-1870s, "the crossroads cheese factory had become ubiquitous throughout Oneida County, often appearing next to the village schoolhouse at the center of the rural neighborhood; home cheesemaking had virtually disappeared.

New York State was universally regarded as the leading exponent of commercial cheese manufacture, in terms of both technological skill and equipment. Beginning in the 1850s experienced New York cheesemakers made their way to northern California - particularly to Marin, Sonoma, and Santa Clara counties. Not surprisingly, New York models were adopted in California when the first factories were built in the early 1870s.

Cheesemaking was both a science and an art and involved myriad well-timed steps requiring judgment and experience in order to produce a safe, palatable, and marketable product. Commercial cheesemaking in San Luis Obispo County got under way in the late 1860s and had the advantage of technological advances developed on the east coast, including the use of stationary vats with built-in boilers instead of kettles, tubs and open fires. Steel multi-bladed curd knives replaced wooden knives, and mechanical presses, including both lever and screw types, replaced clumsier contraptions that often used heavy stones to supply the needed pressure.ⁱⁱⁱ The Excelsior Cheese Factory, established in 1871, was well equipped to take full advantage of a burgeoning industry.

Excelsior Cheese Factory

A commercial cheese factory had initially been projected for San Luis Obispo County by Charles H. Ivens and Edward A. Everett in 1869. In January of that year Ivens and Everett had purchased a 267-acre parcel north of Harmony from George W. Armstrong, one of the first settlers to obtain a portion of the former Rancho Santa Rosa. The Armstrongs had arrived in the area in 1867 and established a dairy on Santa Rosa Creek. It is likely that Ivens and Everett also established a dairy on their newly acquired land. In November of that year the Tribune reported that "Messrs. Ivans [sic] and Everett contemplate establishing a cheese factory on their rancho. It is about time, as we consider it a disgrace to the best dairy land in the state or county that cheese should be imported into Cambria from New York and eagerly bought up at 25 cents per pound."^iv The proposed factory does not appear to have been built, however, or at least not in the immediate vicinity of Harmony.

The credit for establishing the first cheese factory in San Luis Obispo County - and one of the first in the entire state -may belong to Thomas Bowen and John C. Baker. Bowen acquired a 3-acre parcel just east of the present town of Harmony from Robert Perry, an Irish immigrant who operated a dairy ranch on some 850 acres that stretched from what is known today as the Harmony Valley westward to the coast. Bowen's 3-acre parcel was level, adjacent to a creek, and advantageously located in the midst of a rapidly expanding dairy region. Bowen and Baker had certainly erected their cheese factory by late February 1871, as its location is clearly delineated on a map dated February 24, 1871.^v County assessment rolls for 1870-1871 reveal that Thomas Bowen "of San Simeon" was assessed for "3 acres situated on Santa Rosa Rancho whereon is erected the Excelsior Cheese Factory and out Houses." His (delinquent) taxes were computed based on an evaluation of $25 for land value, $400 for improvements, and $25 for a horse.^vi

The site of the Excelsior Cheese Factory, approximately one-sixth mile east of the present townsite of Harmony, represented the prototype of "industrial" cheesemaking operations in the Harmony Valley. This first effort was only moderately successful, but it established a local, factory-based economy that persisted until the mid twentieth century. No photographs of the original Excelsior Cheese Factory, a two-story frame structure that measured forty by fifty feet, are known to exist, but comparative photographs and illustrations of contemporary cheese factories in New York State and in other parts of California make it possible to surmise what the Harmony factory probably looked like (Figure 1).

An overview of the operations of the Excelsior Cheese Factory provides insight into the organizational structure of cooperative cheese factories and exemplifies the evolution of cheese factory buildings from the original two-story New York models to "modern" twentieth-century plants.

The enduring contribution of the Excelsior Cheese Factory was its role as a prototype for commercial cheese manufacture in the Harmony Valley. After an interval of thirty years, Harmony Valley again launched a new enterprise that would continue to drive economic activity in the region for half a century.

Harmony Valley Creamery Association

The interval between the demise of the Excelsior Cheese Factory and the advent of the Harmony Valley Creamery Association continued to be years of active dairy production along the North Coast. During this time, both federal and state agencies were organized to regulate the dairy industry. Such regulation was another step in the transition from farm-processed to commercially processed dairy products. At least two new cooperative creameries were organized on the North Coast in the 1890s. The Home Creamery, established in the San Simeon area, produced both butter and cheese and served dairy farmers from Cambria as far north as San Carpoforo Creek, near the Monterey County line. The Cambria Creamery served 38 dairy farmers from Cambria south to Cayucos, and presumably included the dairy farmers of the Harmony Valley at that time. Both creameries did a lackluster business for about 10 years. Many of the members, disenchanted with the idea of cooperative creameries since they either lost money or made negligible profits, were reportedly not sorry when both plants "burned to the ground within a few months of each other."^vii C. L. Mitchel, the butter inspector for the U. S. Department of Agriculture's Dairy Division from 1907 to 1909, believed that the two cooperatives had ultimately failed because of "poor plant methods which produced inferior butter [which], as a result, received the lowest market prices."  ^viii

The dismal condition of North Coast commercial creameries was revolutionized through the efforts of M. G. Salmina (1874-1960), a Swiss-Italian immigrant who settled in the Cambria area in 1891 with his brother. Like so many other Swiss- Italians who arrived in California in the 1870s-1890s, Salmina turned to dairying to make a living in his new homeland. In 1903 he took a bold step by enrolling in a short course in creamery manufacturing offered at the University of California, Berkeley. After completing the course, Salmina was put in charge of the J. P. Sargent Estate Company's 200-cow dairy south of Gilroy, in the southern Santa Clara Valley. After two years, the dairy herd was moved to San Jose and sold to a business specializing in market milk. Salmina worked for that business for six months and then took charge of one of several cheese factories operating at that time in the San Felipe region, a major dairying district near Hollister in San Benito County, where he won gold medals for his products.

In 1907 Salmina returned to Switzerland for a six-month visit with his family before settling permanently in San Luis Obispo County. At the age of 33, Salmina had amassed considerable practical experience in buttermaking, cheesemaking, and liquid milk marketing. He was both a seasoned dairyman and businessman, and he was ready to embark on an enterprise of his own. ^ix

Salmina's opportunity came in October 1907 when his brother, Paul, who owned a small dairy in Harmony Valley, invited him to establish a small cheesemaking plant on the dairy property. Salmina accordingly set up a "makeshift establishment ... using steam to operate the machinery."^x The results were encouraging, and Salmina attracted the attention of Harmony Valley dairy farmers. The following year one of the local dairymen (presumably one of the Perrys) offered to provide a site for a new and larger factory on land near the junction of Perry (Harmony) Creek and the county road, which provided easy access to the creamery. Salmina accepted the offer after carefully considering the prospects for success and after consulting with his friend and adviser, C. L. Mitchel. The site provided for Salmina's new creamery and cheese factory is the present-day location of the unincorporated community of Harmony, and Salmina's factory became the nucleus of a new "rural industrial" complex (Figure 2).

Construction on Salmina's new plant began in September 1908. Within a month of digging the well, the factory was ready to open.^xi Operating under the name Diamond Creamery, the plant advertised itself as a manufacturer of "fancy creamery butter & full cream cheese." The new creamery building was a small, one­story frame building.^xii Though less elaborate than the Excelsior Cheese Factory had been, Salmina's factory was nonetheless consistent with a type of cheese factory built since at least the 1890s in dairy regions across the United States, including San Benito County, where Salmina had previously worked. Although specific information about the equipment installed at the Diamond Creamery does not survive, trade catalogs of the period suggest that, at the minimum, the factory would have been equipped with "Separators, Vats, Churns, Cheese Presses, Curd Mills, Weigh Can, Scales, Boiler and Engine, Shafting, Hangars [and] Pulleys (Figure 3-4)."^xiii

With his new enterprise launched, Salmina still had his work cut out for him in garnering support for a cooperative creamery venture. The earlier failures of the Home and Cambria creameries made local dairymen hesitant about joining another cooperative. Salmina, perhaps hedging his bets, also managed another small creamery in Cayucos for a short time, but the growing success of the fledgling Diamond Creamery soon required all his time and energy.xiv Salmina worked tirelessly to restore confidence in the idea of a cooperative and to improve the poor market reputation of San Luis Obispo County butter. Discouraged by the continually low quality of cream delivered to his plant, Salmina began offering a premium for sweet cream. His plans were greatly assisted by timely advice from Mitchel, who in 1910 became the first manager of the newly organized Challenge Creamery and Butter Association, an influential position which he held for 36 years.^xv

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Introduction

A Railroad Runs Through it: The San Luis Obispo Southern Pacific Railroad Historic District (pages 2 - 7)

Woolen Mills Chinatown of San Jose (pages 8 - 9)

Whitley Gardens and the James Dean Memorial (pages 10 - 12)

Harmony Along the Coast (pages 13 - 14)

Bibliography