Beacon… Got Milk?

Beacon was home to a number of businesses that bottled milk and produced a variety of dairy products. Advertisements, bottles, and other artifacts are all that remain of the dairy businesses that provided fresh milk, butter, and ice cream to our community in the early part of the 20th century.

Prior to that time, milk and milk products were made primarily for home or local use. Mass production and improvement of the quality of milk was important as cities across the country grew due to industrialization and immigration. New inventions helped make milk healthy and commercially viable including mass produced milk bottles, milking machines, tuberculin tests for cattle, pasteurization equipment, refrigerated milk tank cars, and automatic bottling machines.

The first modern dairy was Magnolia Farms, founded by Major E. Vail Watson in 1913. He purchased land in Fishkill (near Castle Point) from the Brinckerhoff family to build a dairy farm. Then, he set up a milk bottling operation at 33 North Cedar Street in Beacon known as Magnolia Farms Co., which soon became a staple of the Beacon community. The farm acquired numerous prized cows for milking and became the largest milk distributor in the area by 1925. Magnolia advertised the safety of their product due to cleanliness, pasteurization, and tuberculin testing. In 1920, an expert from Cornell University observed and tested the pure bred registered Holstein herds production. Several cows were producing 55-58 quarts of milk and 3-4.5 pounds of butter a day. Cows were found “free of disease… and the method of producing and handling the milk is done under the most sanitary and clean methods possible…. perfect balanced ration, especially for children.”

Competition amongst dairy farms and distributors was fierce at that time.  In 1922, Watson sued a competitor who was caught using stolen Magnolia Farms milk bottles in an attempt to hurt business.  Later, a five dollar reward was offered for a lost milk route driver’s account book (worth $90 today). 

All good things come to an end. Magnolia Farms filed for bankruptcy in 1927 and shut down the bottling plant. The farm itself remained in business until 1952. A year later, philanthropist Marion Foster (formerly Brinkerhoff) purchased 15 acres of the land and turned it into a Girl Scout day camp. Two years it was later renamed Camp Foster and is currently part of the Town of Fishkill Parks.

Shortly after the bottling plant closed, it was bought by Beacon Dairy. It was sold again in 1935 to Emmadine Farms of Hopewell Junction (owned by the retail store tycoon J. C. Penney.) In the next few years, Emmadine increased their business five-fold producing 40,000 to 60,000 quarts of milk, 1,000 gallons of ice cream, cream, cottage cheese, buttermilk, chocolate drink, skim milk and orange drink daily. The operations were so impressive that visitors from Japan, the Philippines, South America and Australia came to view it. Emmadine had 78 shipping routes in Dutchess, Putnam, Westchester and Orange county with 14 additional dealers in Peekskill and Beacon. The plant closed down in 1959. Fitchett Brothers in Poughkeepsie purchased milk routes in Beacon and Poughkeepsie a year later.

Brunetto Cheese Co of Yonkers took over the factory in 1961. Brunetto converted the milk bottling and ice cream plant in order to produce mozzarella, ricotta, lasagna, ravioli, manicotti, and other products. Problems arose when the company was unable to dispose of the whey produced in the cheese processing. When the city’s treatment plant couldn’t handle the waste, Brunetto searched for alternatives such as converting the whey to methane. The plant closed in 1998. Underground storage fuel tanks and hazardous waste were removed and the soil remediated by 2000. Today, single family homes are located on the land where the former factory stood.

For eighty five years, Beacon was home to a handful of dairy businesses. The Beacon Historical Society has a small but growing collection of artifacts and news clippings from this time period as seen below. If you have any stories or materials that you would like to share… we would love to hear from you! Thank you to our volunteer Myles Goldblatt for cataloging our bottle collection and researching Beacon’s dairy industry for this article.

To learn more about the dairy industry in the Hudson Valley, visit the Orange County Milk Bottle Museum of Central Valley, NY. The museum has the largest collection of milk bottles (over 800) from this region once revered for its dairy products. With a legacy beginning in 1842 with the first shipment of milk by rail in the nation, milk bottles are among the only remaining relics that reveal how approximately 2,900 of these farms once existed across the county at the turn of the twentieth century.  To learn more click here: https://alexprizgintas.com/orange-county-milk-bottle-museum/