310 Construction and Heating of Dairy and Cheese Rooms. 
Note. — Reference has been made in the foregoing essay to 
the introduction of cheese factories and the Cheddar system of 
cheese-making into the United States of America. To these 
causes may doubtless be attributed the great improvement 
latterly observable in the best made American cheese, which 
now finds a ready sale at high prices among the most fastidious 
consumers in England. On these points much information has 
been diffused by means of the annual reports of the American 
Dairymen's Association — an institution having for its aim 
" mutual improvement in the science of cheese-making, and 
more efficient action in promoting the general interest of the 
dairy community." From the reports of this Association, 
and information derived from official sources, it appears that 
whereas the factory system only took root in the United States 
in the year 1851, and so recently as 1860 had only rami- 
fied into seventeen branches, there are at the present time, in 
active operation, not less than one thousand cheese-factories — 
working up the milk of nearly a quarter of a million of cows — 
and from many of them very excellent cheese of uniform quality 
is periodically turned out. How the idea of these factories in 
the first instance originated there are no means of determining ; 
but it is a suggestive fact, as stated by Mr. Willard in a recent 
address to the members of the Dairymen's Association assembled 
at Utica, that about a century ago the farmers of the romantic 
village of Cheddar, at the foot of the Mendip hills in Somerset- 
shire, united the milk of their cows for the purpose of making a 
large cheese ; this they did alternately at each other's houses, 
and from that time to the present the best thick cheese of 
Somerset has borne the name of Cheddar. To this joint-stock 
method of production may probably be traced the germ of the 
American factory system ; and it is not a little remarkable that 
Mr. Willard, after having seen all the different styles of cheese in 
Great Britain, does not hesitate to express his opinion " that the 
Cheddar is the only process from which the American dairyman 
can obtain suggestions of much practical utility." * He describes 
the cheese as an article of a very high standard, deserving of all 
the encomia from time to time conferred on it, and attributes its 
pure and delicious flavour to the scrupulous care and cleanliness 
with which all the operations from first to last are carried out in 
well-conducted dairies. On this point the following remarks by 
Mr. Willard are equally instructive and interesting, and all the 
more so because he does not hesitate to expose and denounce many 
objectionable features in ill-placed and badly regulated factories. 
" The English dairyman lias a cleaner and better flavoured millc than gene- 
rally obtains with us. The milking is performed with great nicety, in tin 
* Third Annual Report of the American Dairyman's Asscc'ation (1867), p. 39. 
