Small Town Cheese:
Dairy Farming in Roseboom
When the hops industry moved west, Roseboom farmers switched to raising dairy cattle. Farmers like Stephen Judson’s family milked their cows by hand, stored the milk in the Cherry Valley Creek to keep cool and sold the surplus to the local cheese factory, Rockdale Company.
Milk was canned and delivered daily to the residents of Roseboom. Over the generations, the milking and distribution process became more mechanized. Milk is picked up by large tanker trucks and shipped to urban processing facilities where it is mixed with other farms’ milk in the pasteurization process.
The cheese factory in Roseboom is no more, but it lives on in the memory of its residents.
Cheese factory, date unknown
I usually milked four cows night and morning and occasionally I got as high as seven. I didn’t like it and the cows didn’t like it either. They would always try
to kick me and quite occasionally the pail would go flying.
SIDNEY JUDSON
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The average sized farm was probably 15 to 25 cows with
25 cows being a large dairy
for that period of time
and then, of course, that led way to the creameries that were around and the milk truck drivers that came around and picked up canned milked. Every morning they did that. That was long before bulk tanks.
JACK VANBUREN
Hear more about Sidney Judson's memories of the cheese factory as
read by David Boeckel
Hear more about dairy farming from Jack VanBuren