12 ILLINOIS dairymen's ASSOCIATION. 



the name of being one among the foremost dairy states of the present sister- 

 hood of the United States. 



In the spring of 1870 the idea was conceived by a few dairy farmers living 

 near a small town of about five thousand inhabitants, in the northern part 

 of the state, of erecting a creamery. A meeting was subsequently held, the 

 money raised by subscription to the stock, and the creamery was built with- 

 out delay and put in operation. 



This was the first creamery erected and operated west of the great lakes. 



Here, then, was the beginning of the great creamery system of the west, 

 now overspreading the great northwest, and which has been the means of 

 largely increasing the wealth of the farmers wherever adopted and judiciously 

 operated. The town alluded to above now contains between fifteen and 

 twenty thousand people, and is environed by a dairy farming country where 

 the mother of the Bovine family holds sway, as well as a portion of the purse 

 string of the thrifty farmer, which she only unlooses upon receiving good 

 shelter from the cold, bleak winds and storms of winter, together with good, 

 kind, humane treatment from day to day. 



She, by her fine lacteal flow, has contributed her might to raise means to 

 lift the farm mortgages wherever existing in her district, to build, paint and 

 put in repair a good farm residence for her master, and lastly, although by 

 no means least, to build for herself a nice cow parlor (if I may be allowed 

 the expression in contradistinction to the old hovel of years by gone), in some 

 part of the spacious barn recently erected on the premises, where she may 

 ruminate and repose during the long winter nights annually expected in this 

 latitude. She has dispensed with the beautiful yet slender milkmaid, with 

 pint cup in hand, as of yore, and called to her side the stalwart man, not 

 particularly of political notoriety in New York, but the genuine stalwart, 

 who, with pail in hand, having a capacity of four or five gallons, which she 

 occasionally fills to its utmost with the pure lacteal fluid at a single milking. 

 Now it is not my purpose to misstate or try to mislead any person in regard 

 to the dairy interests of this state, or the country at large. But when I see 

 the following in print, it would seem to me that it calls for a passing 

 comment. 



The statistician who figured in the United States Commissioner's report 

 of Agriculture, published in Washington, D. C, in 1883, gives the following: 

 Thus the irrepressible statistician of the dairy convention has a field rich in 

 possibilities for exaggeration of the products, the value and the importance 

 generally of the dairy interest. The aggregates are sufliciently large to satisfy 

 a reasonable ambition for ''■ big figures," and it is proposed here to obtain a 

 cool and deliberate judgment of the real status of this industry. 



Now, my friends, let us take a careful retrospective view of the facts and 

 figures given by this cool, deliberate gentleman at Washington. He gives 

 the number of cows in the United States in 1880 as 12,443,120. and then goes 

 on to give the gallons of milk sold from farms or manufactured in farm 

 dairies, and reported in the census of farm production, in equivalent gallons 

 of milk for 1880 as amounting to 2,893,698,520 gallons. 



Now if we divide this amount of milk given by the number of cows as 

 above, it will give us, if I mistake not, 232.6 gallons as the average yield of milk 



