Dave Wood

Over the years my friend Charlie Vanasse and his late father Ted have provided me with a cornucopia of historic lore from western Wisconsin. Recently, Charlie, who lives on the family farm, just supplied me with a tome about cheese factories from his vast personal library, gleaned from their family’s experiences in Wisconsin’s St. Croix Valley.

It’s a classy 300-page paperback called “Cows, Creameries, and Cheese Factories,” published by the St. Croix Association for home-community education (1995), a group of women who met frequently for lunch on one farm or another and assembled the book. Charlie sent it to me when he learned my father was a butter-maker between 1932 and 1965. I wish Dad were still around to enjoy this book about all the milk processors in western Wisconsin. (There were 19 creameries in a two-county area on Wisconsin’s western edge in 1916, 16 cheese factories in the same county in 1918.)

The book features photographs of those creameries, who owned them, and the men who dug armloads of butter out of those big old-fashioned wooden churns and cut curds to make the Longhorn cheese and mild Colby that we chewed on before the artisan factories replaced them to make way for all the fancy cheeses, the names of which we can’t pronounce.

When I was a lad I worked alongside Dad, printing and wrapping butter at the Whitehall Co-op Creamery, whose first president was my great uncle Dewey Parsons. It still stands, a crumbling heap located next to number seven tee-off of the Whitehall Country Club.

Last year, my long-lost relative, genealogist Sean Parsons, Dewey’s great-great grandson, came all the way from Walla-Walla, Wash. just to purloin a white brick from the crumbling heap!

The luncheon ladies put together a very humorous and informative collection of cartoons donated by the incredibly talented Bob Artley, nationally known humorist who shows the reader how to grab a cow’s teat (watch out for barbed wire cuts!) and force milk out, clean the barn, and climb the dreaded silo chute.

The ladies provided a rundown of various breeds, such as “milking shorthorns,” the breed my grandpa thought was best. They weighed 1,400 pounds each, and their color was white and roan; they yielded 9,000 to 10,000 pounds of milk per year, and their butterfat content averaged 4%.

The ladies included humorous photos of various farmers, including one old geezer who looked as if he had stepped out of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” with a pitchfork, standing in his field. The cutline was: “A Farmer Outstanding in His Field,” and the piece included photos of stack-thrashing and the behemoths that steamed through the coulees with exotic names like Advance, Rumely, Minneapolis, Farmall, and John Deere GPs. There were also recipes for the diarrhea-inducing “country rommegrot” and less persuasive “city rommegrot” and for ice cream, to be made when the cream piled up and the milk haulers couldn’t make it through the snowdrifts.

Even Charlie’s father earned a slot in the segment called “Milking Outside.” “Ted Vanasse, who was born in 1906, and lived on the outskirts of Spring Valley, said that his folks had one cow that they pastured at a neighbor’s. Each morning and evening, the cow was brought to the house and milked in the yard, then returned to the pasture. This gave the family milk to drink. Later, the family moved to a farm and had more cows, which they also milked outside. Ted said they didn’t tie them, although some had to be fed so they would stay in place to be milked.” You can tell from this book that these indomitable women who cobbled the book together had an artistic touch, by leading off with a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, called “The Cow,” a poem I had never read before.

The friendly cow, all red and white,

            I love with all my heart.

She gives me cream with all her might,

            To eat with apple tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,

            And yet she cannot stray

All in the pleasant open air,

            The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the winds that pass

            And wet with all the showers,

She walks along the meadow grass,

            And eats the meadow flowers.

Reading through the ladies’ beautifully done book, my thoughts went back to my family’s old creamery, long ago abandoned by a merger with Land O’ Lakes, and it brought a tear to my rheumy eyes, thinking about working side-by-side with my muscular father, as if I were almost a man.

And I hear once again the milk haulers approaching the unloading dock. First, Norman Hallingstad, in his new green Studebaker Straight Job, purring up the mild slope, then my uncle Charlie Briggs and his old bulbous Ford unloading 10-gallon cans onto the rolllers (ding-ding-ding!), banging the can tops with a wooden club to loosen them (boing!), swearing at the ones that were too tight. Ah memories!

Dave would like to hear from you. Phone him at 715-426-9554.