ANDERSON JERSEY DAIRY
1930 to 1963
Written by Charles Anderson
The door-to-door retail selling and wholesale selling to stores, restaurants, etc., of
milk and milk by-products by my parents, O. Fred and Edessa M.. Anderson, was a humble
start during those depression days of the 1930s. No exact date can be stated as to when we
started selling to customers, but I can remember my mother delivering milk while I was
riding with her on the way to school in 1938. My father had taken the back seat out of our
1935 Pontiac, and he would put three or four cases of milk in gallon size glass jugs back
there.
My folks' four- to five acre dairy farm was located just south of the old Indian
trading fort site of Fort Lupton and one-fourth mile west of The Great Western Sugar
Company factory. This old Indian trading fort of Fort Lupton was built in 1836 by
Lancaster Platte Lupton. This fort was the southern one of four Indian trading forts built
in close proximity of each other along the South Platte River.
My folks' dairy farm was built on a hill with most of the buildings on top of the hill
and the barn yard on the west side top of the hill, on the slope of the hill, and at the
bottom of the hill next to an irrigation ditch. We had on the average of 25 head of
Jerseys-- hence the name"Anderson Jersey Dairy", and early on one Holstein cow.
When we expanded to other towns and had to buy milk from other farmers, we sometimes used
the name "Anderson Dairy". Since we had very little pasture land, I and
sometimes hired hands would pasture the cows along the road going one mile to the west and
then one mile south along a Great Western Sugar Company railroad which they didn't use at
that time.
When my parents got married on September 19, 1931, they had planned to live in Fort
Collins. My father had a job with Colorado A & M College extension service as a herd
tester going around to dairy farms in Colorado and Wyoming testing individual cow's milk
for butter fat and weight. But since my grandmother, Jeanette (Jenny) Kelly Ewing, who
came to Colorado with her parents and two sisters in 1886 from Wabash, Ontario, Canada,
was ill they stayed with her. My grandfather, William (Billy) Albert Ewing, was the first
white child born in a Blackhawk/Central City, Colorado, gold camp on April 11, 1861. He
was gored to death by a registered Guernsey bull on February 15,1925. Neither my sister
Janet, nor I, Charles Anderson, ever saw him since I was born in 1932 and Janet in 1933.
The dairy farm had previously been owned by my grandparents, William and Jenny Ewing. It
wasn't bought by my parents until after my grandmother's death in October 1948. At the
time of my grandmother's death, there were three heirs to my grandparents place-- my
mother (Edessa Mary Ewing Anderson) and her two brothers Wallace and Charlie Ewing. My
parents bought out my mother's brothers' shares which amounted to about $8,000.
Our first milk house was the two-story high square building (approximately 15' X 15')
with a sunken water tank for 10-gallon milk cans built by my grandparents. The milk
house and the main house (built around 1900) always had running cold water because there
was a windmill on the south side of the milk house that pumped water into a tank that was
elevated. The original milk house had two additions to it as business expanded. First,
there was a lean-to added on the west side for a small walk-in refrigerator and floor
space for bottling milk. Before pasteurization was required, we merely put washed bottles
in cases on the floor and filled them with a hand filler and capped them with a plug hand
capper. As business expanded and pasteurization was required in 1949, we built on three
more rooms -- a coal boiler room; a pasteurization, bottling, cooling, and separator room;
and a big room for an old army surplus walk-in refrigerator. This didn't last too long
before a more sanitary building was required. Consequently, my folks had an approximately
30' X 50' glazed brick (stucco on the outside) building built in approximately 1950. While
the building was being built, my dad had made arrangements with Carlson-Frink in Denver to
sell their products until the new building was completed. As business expanded and time
passed, we built on four more times to this new building. For more storage space, we used
about half of the hay loft of the barn with a tightly enclosed room for bottle caps,
cheese cartons, butter boxes and wrappers, milk cartons, bottles, etc. The barn had
stations and milking machines for milking cows. On the west side, it had a concrete outer
wall and on the north side of the barn there was one of the first concrete 12' to 15'
diameter silos built in Colorado.
For our delivery trucks, my dad had a four-truck garage built with a pit grease rack
and air compressor. At the start of World War II, when you couldn't buy a new delivery
truck, my father had the lumber yard build a rounded topped plywood box which was about
four feet high which completely filled the flat bed part of our '37 Chevy pickup. It had a
small door back of the driver's seat and double doors on the very back. It could be slid
on and off the flatbed as needed, if you were going to haul hay, pigs, or cattle. It was
painted red on all the
sides and silver on top. It kept the milk surprisingly cold. It wasn't until 1946 that we
could buy new delivery trucks. Our first new delivery truck was a one-ton dark green Ford
van. At the top of our expansion, we had three trucks delivering milk, etc., six days a
week, and a fourth truck part time. I recall that milk sold for ten cents a quart during
World War II. When we started expanding the towns to which we delivered milk, we started
buying milk from other dairies around us. We would pick up milk in ten gallon cans. Later,
we went to bulk handling. Where the dairy farms we picked up from had to have a stainless
steel refrigerated tank, we had a stainless steel tank on our flat bed truck which we
would hook up to the farmer's tank and pump the milk into ours.
At the peak of our expansion, we were delivering milk to rural areas and the towns of
Fort Lupton, Platteville, Dacona, Keenesburg, Frederick, Firestone, Hudson, Gilcrest,
Brighton, Derby, Adams City, and a rural area around Prospect Valley (east of Hudson). We
were not the only dairy delivering in Fort Lupton. There were two or more dairies (Frinks,
Apple, etc.) delivering also. We delivered milk first in glass one-gallon jugs with a wire
handle for carrying and those large plug caps. Later, we added 2-quart aluminum pails also
with a wire handle for carrying and a metal cap. After a while we started using one-quart
milk bottles with long slender necks that showed off the large cream line that Jersey milk
had. Our next container was a squat round 1-quart bottle with our name on it. This was
followed by a square 1-quart bottle that used a lot less space. We used this kind until we
sold out our milk routes. We also sold homogenized milk and cream in coated paper cartons
in ½ pint, pint, quart, and ½ gallon sizes. Later we also sold milk in ½ gallon glass
containers which comprised the majority of our sales in later years. We sold all the cream
products -- whip cream, coffee cream, and half and half. We also sold eggs, chocolate and
orange drinks, buttermilk, Tillamook cheddar cheese, Bredan cottage cheese, and butter.
After I came back from Oregon State University, I made the sweet cream butter, genuine
buttermilk from the butter (most buttermilk is cultured skim milk), 14% butterfat ice
cream, and ice milk.
For Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, we would also make nonalcoholic eggnog,
which we made by adding a special mix to the milk. We sold just straight pasteurized milk
for a long time and people loved it because they could pour off the top for the cream for
cereals or coffee. When we started filtering and standardizing the butter fat in our
different products with a centrifuge, the Jersey milk being so high in butterfat (around
6%) the cream would churn. The just pasteurized milk would then have a sort of
butter on top, rather than cream. We then resorted to homogenizing all of our milk to
overcome that situation.
Around the 1960s, the Federal Milk Marketing Order came into existence. This ordinance
severely penalized smaller dairies since the ordinance was based on a balance of bottled
or carton milk with milk by products. Small dairies usually had more bottle or cartoned
milk than milk by-products, such as ice cream, butter, and cottage cheese. They ended up
paying a penalty which ended up going to the larger dairies. Also, around this time, women
in families began working outside the home more and, as such, did not get home delivery as
much.
In the early 1960s, we stopped processing and bought our products from a dairy
processor located around Fort Morgan. They were an all Jersey Dairy and so we continued
selling a Jersey product. Some time later, we switched to buying our products from Bordan
in Denver. They carried Guernsey milk as a specialty, but other mixed breed milk as
standard and quite a variety of other products. In about 1963, we sold our milk routes to
another party in Brighton.
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