Gilroy had milk
By the time the spanking clean, state-of-the-art Live Oak
Creamery opened in April 1908, the Gilroy area’s dairy industry was
second only to agriculture in Santa Clara County’s economy. It was
a distinction the product held for approximately 40 years, between
1910-1940.
Gilroy had milk
By the time the spanking clean, state-of-the-art Live Oak Creamery opened in April 1908, the Gilroy area’s dairy industry was second only to agriculture in Santa Clara County’s economy. It was a distinction the product held for approximately 40 years, between 1910-1940.
The Live Oak facility, located just across the railroad tracks at Martin and Railroad Streets, boasted a cold room with one-foot thick walls and redwood sawdust packed into the attic for insulation. An adjacent room held butter churns, cheese vats and forms for making the popular Monterey Jack, cream cheese, cheddar and granular cheeses.
The operation was built by Tracy Learnard, who previously had run a private creamery enterprise on his Solis district dairy, about 3½ miles west of Gilroy. Many neighbors, instead of shipping their product to Hollister or San Jose, brought their milk to him for processing.
The March 29, 1907 Gilroy Gazette noted, “Mr. Learnard has quite a number of cows and like the rest of the dairymen, he has been shipping the cream to other parts to be turned into butter and placed on the market by someone else. He decided to establish a creamery in Gilroy and fitted a building…with all the machinery and appliances, for an up-to-date creamer, separator, cream vats, churn and testers all run by steam…on March 17, he turned out his first box of butter, named the ‘Live Oak’ brand.”
The Live Oak Creamery was not the first or only such operation in the area, but it became the largest. For a time Gilroy was known as the Dairy Capital of California, as distinctive in cheese production as Petaluma once was in the egg industry. On Feb. 6, 1897, the Gilroy Advocate reported, “The State Dairy Bureau reports Santa Clara County in the lead as the producer of cheese. We might add Gilroy gives this honor to the county.”
Gilroy cheese won second prize at the 1902 State Fair. A.J. Davis of the Las Animas Cheese Factory took top honors at a July 1916 state contest in which sample submissions from other regions were variously judged as rancid, mealy and even falling apart, given the hot summer weather. Only Gilroy cheese withstood the test and passed with flying colors.
An earlier dairymen’s alliance, called the Gilroy Cheese Factory
Association, had met in September 1877 at the San Ysidro School to form a partnership. W. N. Furlong was the director, with board members J.H. Ellis, J.S. Jones, E.A. Davison and Henry Reeve. With capital stock of $4,500 in shares of $100 each, the men purchased an acre of ground from David Zuck to construct the factory, completed on Jan. 1, 1878. Besides the factory, many dairymen also produced butter and cheese on their own ranches.
Gilroy’s cheese industry peaked in the 1880s, with 11,472 pounds shipped from the Gilroy railroad station in one month alone. The 1881 output was 86,148 pounds, valued at $12,000. But by 1905 there was an 80 percent decline in the industry. New government regulations on moisture content were blamed, along with an increase in acreage turned over to row crops and orchards, considered more profitable given the area’s rich soil conditions.
The earliest Gilroy area dairymen were Oscar and Henry Reeve, who started a dairy between 1855 and 1860, and pioneer Rodney Eschenburg, who began his operation in 1858. The Reeve brothers, with 800 cows, employed 30 milkers and two cheese makers on their 2,000 acres, partially leased on the Martin and Shepherd tracts. The brothers also owned 12,000 acres in the Gavilan range, which provided spring pasturage for their herds. At one time, according to a local newspaper report, the Reeves’ cheese stock on hand was valued at $30,000, with a cheese price of 13 cents a pound. The product was hauled to a shipping point at Alviso. The brothers ran their private dairy business until 1870 when prices for cheese, cattle and hogs plummeted.
Other early names in the local dairy industry were Albert Dexter, S.M. Maze, Andy Meyer, Albert Willson, Michael Fitzgerald, Massy Thomas, Alex Watson, E.A. Sawyer and Tom and Sam Rea. By the second decade of the 20th Century, dairyman C.C. Lester was known for his fancy cheese product, along with Richard Brem, who ran what a local report called a “model dairy business.” Lester established a modern cheese factory in 1913. The average 12,000-pound milk shipment was received twice daily from 16 surrounding dairies and made into cheese following both the morning and afternoon deliveries. The practice was claimed to be indispensable in high-grade cheese manufacturing. August Gubser and Jacob Husang also manufactured cheese, as well as A. Rianda, V. Frassetti, M. Bettencourt and F.B. Sperber. Local partnerships included Lester and Fravi, Lester and Silacci, and Silacci and Silva.
In a 1916 interview, Richard Brem was quoted as saying Gilroy cheese was popular because the absence of alkali in local water meant he never had to heat the milk over 102 degrees Fahrenheit. In areas where the water contained a high alkali content, he noted, milk had to be heated to 160 degrees, a process which drove out much of the butterfat. Gilroy’s fine climate, said to have “heat enough to grow feed but not enough to injure the milk,” was also attributed to helping produce the high quality cheese.
Learnard operated the Live Oak Creamery until 1912, when he leased it to the Model Creamery of San Jose, which had other factories in Hollister, Santa Cruz and Castroville. By 1915 the factory was turning out 500 pounds of butter a day. In 1920 Mr. Learnard sold the creamery to the W.D. Ayers Co., which made additions to the building including an air circulation cupola and a state-required lab to test milk samples.
For 10 years Swiss dairymen Walter and Lacey Luchessa ran the operation, turning out a daily quota of 300 pounds of butter, 300 pounds of cheese and 150 cases of eggs. At its peak during the decade, cheese production came to 1.3 million pounds annually. In the 1930s, Palmer and Ernest Zattola took over the operation, renaming it the Gilroy Cheese Company. They produced cheese locally until 1939, when the operation was moved to Grants Pass, Ore.
By the following year, on the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, cheese making as a prominent local industry had faded from the scene as fruit production took over in the Santa Clara Valley. A still-standing tribute to the days when Gilroy butter and cheese made up one-fifth of the California dairy industry, The Live Oak Creamery, at 88 Martin Street, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
