438 Bureau of Farmers' Institutes. 



look for a moment at the evolution in the care and marketing 

 of her products. 



In the memory of many of yon, almost in the lifetime of we 

 of the younger generation, the manufacture and sale of but- 

 ter, milk and cheese has grown from a local industry, carried 

 on by thrifty housewives beside the kitchen fires, to a great 

 organized and systematized business. For more than a hundred 

 years New York city drew its daily supply of milk from the 

 farmers of Manhattan Island. Those were the palmy times, 

 when Harlem and Bloomingdale were remote country villages, 

 and the Bowery, as the name still indicates, a shady lane through 

 which the thrifty citizens drove their cows every morning 

 to pasture. And when the growing city began to feel the 

 need of more milk than could be produced on Manhattan Island, 

 a ferryman broke the corner on the price by bringing a supply 

 from the mainland in his skiff. It is hardly fifty years since 

 the Erie railroad ran the first milk train, bringing milk from the 

 then almost immeasurable distance of forty miles. And now, 

 every day in the year, fast trains rush into New York bringing 

 more than 25,000 cans of milk from five different States, some of 

 it almost 400 miles away. 



And this already great milk-shipping business is constantly 

 growing and promises to become the principal dairying business 

 of the New England and eastern States. The city consumption 

 of milk is increasing by leaps and bounds because supply creates 

 demand, and because the people are coming to know that milk 

 is not primarily a luxury, but that it is one of the cheapest and 

 best foods in the world. As a rule, the greatest growth in popu- 

 lation is being made in the cities of the old and thickly-settled 

 States. Southern New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and 

 New Jersey are getting wondrously full of people. The time has 

 already come in portions of Massachusetts, and much of Connec- 

 ticut, the time will ultimately come here, when the cities will 

 take the entire dairy products of these eastern States in milk and 

 cream — leaving butter and cheese to be imported from more dis- 

 tant localities. 



And the cheese industry has been wonderfully developed. For 

 centuries the dairyman has made cheese, by rule of thumb, an 

 individual art, not a science. When Jesse Williams, in 1851, be- 

 gan to make up into cheese at one plant the milk produced by 

 his sons on neighboring farms, I hardly think he dreamed he 



