Plastic bottles of milk now line refrigerator sections of superstores. The convenience is an evolution of the days when people had to have a cow or buy milk from a neighbor to have the creamy beverage at the supper table.
The Orange County Historical Commission is honoring the dairy industry with a state historical marker. The marker is being installed at the Old Orange Cafe, 914 W. Division in downtown. The cafe is in a two-story brick building constructed in the 1940s as the county’s only pasteurizing dairy. The dedication ceremony will be Wednesday, May 18, at 4 p.m.
Judge Jerry Pennington, chair of the county historical commission, researched and wrote the narrative that gained state approval for the marker.
He found the earliest documented dairy started in the late 1860s by George and Mary Bland Foreman and the business was passed down through generations. The couple milked the cows and then would take the milk in wooden barrels to town and sell it door to door.
Their son, Dave, took over the business in the 1890s and sold the product mostly to restaurants and the railroad. His son, Hugh, bought the dairy in 1936 and “continued to deliver milk to homes and restaurants,” Pennington wrote.
Another early dairy in Orange was owned by the Eddleman family. Pennington said the Eddleman Dairy has a documented history dating back to the late 1880s, when John and Mary Eddleman moved to Orange County and started a farm. The area around Clark Lane and Eddleman Road north of Interstate 10 was the family farm. The area is about four miles north of downtown Orange, which would have been a long horse trip in the days before paved roads.
Pennington said son Joseph Eddleman ran the farm and dairy by 1900 and he called the business “Moonglow Dairy.” The story was the name came because the family milked the cows by the light of the moon. The dairy barn would have been where Interstate 10 motels are now.
After the cows were milked, the milk was poured into ten-gallon milk cans with strainers on top. Pennington said Joseph’s eight children grew up working at the dairy. Son Tom Eddleman joined with his brother-in-law, John Peveto, in 1940 to start a dairy. They milked a hundred cows a day and sold milk to local stores. Later, they sold the product to dairies that pasteurized milk and bottled it.
Health laws affected small dairies. Pennington said laws requiring milk to be pasteurized before being sold began to stop small dairies selling directly to customers. Pennington found an article in the Orange Leader that showed dairies selling “Grade A Raw Milk” included C.L. Linscomb, Will Linscomb, John Burton, the Dennis Dairy, the Renfrew Dairy, the Stoffy Dairy and the Taylor Dairy.
The sale of raw milk was stymied by regulations. In 1929, the Leader reported I.V. Donaldson’s dairy was the largest shipper of raw milk in the county. He sent his milk to the Spears East Texas Milk Dealer in Beaumont where it was pasteurized, bottled and then sold. The Spears family operated dairies in several Texas cities.
The Orange Pasteurizing Dairy, where Old Orange Cafe is now, was the only processing dairy in the county’s history. Pennington said it was incorporated in 1940 and operated by Clyde Spears.
The brick building was opened in 1941 with all the sanitary measures needed for a clean product, including tile floors and ceramic tile on the walls. The floors had drains built in so they could be washed down. Old Orange Cafe has kept the tile and customers can still see the drain covers.
Pennington said at least 16 local dairy farmers sold raw milk to the Orange Dairy. They included Crip Trahan on Irving Street, Gladman Ratcliff on Gum Street, Walter St. Germain on Highway 408, J.E. Furlough on Womack Road, R.M. Lincecum, Able Peveto, C.C. Ridgeway, A.S. Stanton, Horace Peveto, A.W. Peveto, C. Cooper, Lewis Menard and A.O. Phillip.
The Orange Leader in 1942 reported the Orange Dairy was processing 800 gallons of milk a day.
In 1945, the Orange Chamber of Commerce published a booklet about the city and reported “Dairy farms in Orange produced nearly one and a half million gallons of milk in 1940, and it is estimated that the 1945 total greatly exceeds this figure. Thirty-one modern dairies own over 4,000 dairy cattle, ample guarantee that future dairy product needs can be easily met.”
Some of those farmers were selling their milk to larger processors in Beaumont.
The Orange City Commission made sure the Orange Dairy was kept in business. The city passed an ordinance requiring that only milk pasteurized in Orange could be sold in Orange.
But even that didn’t last long. The Borden Company, which had a large processing plant in Beaumont, bought the Orange Dairy in 1948. The larger company then closed the Orange Dairy.
The old dairy building was vacant for years, but was never demolished like many of the other buildings in the downtown area. Susan Childers started the Old Orange Cafe in the building in 1990. Chef David C. Claybar, an Orange native, later bought the cafe and continues to operate it today. The cafe displays some of the original milk bottles from the Orange Dairy.
– Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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