By Kate Tobiasson // History Columnist
WESTBOROUGH – From the start, dairy was a valued product in Massachusetts; the Pilgrims brought the first cow to Plymouth in 1624. It remained a valuable good in the state, even as life and economy rapidly evolved. Throughout the 18th and early 19th century, many families lived on self-sufficient farms. Fathers and sons worked the fields, while mothers and daughters made meals, tended the home, made clothing, and maintained the livestock, as well as processing any dairy. As the country became industrialized and families moved away from this model, the dairy business boomed.
Westborough had a successful dairy industry, thanks to the opening of the Boston-Worcester railroad in 1834. Farmers shipped milk each day to the Boston market in a freight car attached to the morning passenger train. Locally, dairy wagons drove from house to house, disseminating milk from a large metal container. At each home, the milkman would use a dipper to ladle milk from this container and transfer it to a pitcher or other container. Throughout the day, the milk would be continuously contaminated with an assortment of debris.
The revolutionary invention of glass milk bottles in 1885 led to improved quality as well as more efficient storage and transportation of dairy products. The gallons of milk cows in town produced grew from 1,055 to 521,268 from 1865 to 1885. As the farms grew, Westborough dairymen worked together forming collective cooperatives; none proved successful at growing profits and each was dismantled in less than a decade. Farmers struggled to get fair prices from the market, effectively and efficiently store and transport milk, and to collectively industrialize.
In 1911, an outbreak of tonsillitis struck Boston. Over 1,400 people were sickened, and 48 died. The illness was traced back to contaminated milk from Deerfoot Farms in Southborough. After the incident, Deerfoot Farms began in-bottle pasteurization, becoming the most famous and one of the very few dairies to do so at the start of the 20th century; Westborough dairy farmers were not able to afford to pasteurize their own product.
“A lot of milk in the 1930s and 1940s went to the New England Milk Association in the Worcester district where dealers distributed it to big dairies like Meola, Lundgren and Joaitis, or Hood,” explained Jonathan Nourse of the Nourse Family Farm in Kristina Allen’s Off the Beaten Path. “Westborough had mainly small dairies, and they didn’t process their own milk.”
In 1932, a Child Health Association was established in Westborough. After completing their inspections, it was evident that nearly 52% of the sick children in town were ill due to contaminated milk. The town worked to create a pasteurization lab at the high school downtown, but families preferred to buy the less expensive raw milk. Children continued to get sick.
Numerous similar outbreaks across the state led to a number of milk regulations implemented in the early 1930s. In 1931, the 40 dairies in town agreed to have their herds inspected; nearly 500 cows were infected with tuberculosis and were slaughtered.
The state began inspecting and registering dairy farms for safety in 1932, and in 1937, they began to regulate the price of milk. These regulations significantly helped public health, but impacted local families’ abilities to profitably run a dairy farm. It became increasingly difficult to find labor, especially after World War II.
Still, there were 30 dairy farms in Westborough in 1950, and 17 of these farms had over 25 cows. Then, regulations passed requiring all milk be stored in large bulk tank coolers; they were more sanitary than the old milk cans, but cost thousands of dollars. In 1967, there were 15 dairy farms; in 1972 there were eight. By 1984, Howard Uhlman was the last dairy farm remaining in town; the dairy closed after a 1996 fire destroyed the farm. Today, not a single dairy cow calls Westborough home.
