Old Carson Valley Creamery (Part 2)

The new Carson Valley Creamery proved a lucky thing for teamster Fritz Dangberg, who met his wife as a result of driving butter and cheese to Carson City.

Other locals, too, were drivers for the Creamery. Dick Bartel collected milk from farmers in the East Fork area; Dolph Dressler picked up milk cans around Genoa; and Herman Scheele, a Fredericksburg rancher, brought in cans from the ranches between Fredericksburg and Centerville.

Although the new creamery expected a ready market for its butter in San Francisco, that niche proved surprisingly difficult to break into, at first — for a somewhat unexpected reason! Turns out the taste of butter from Carson Valley’s alfalfa-fed cows was different than San Francisco consumers were used to from milk from hay-fed critters. Thankfully, one tenacious San Francisco butter dealer “spent considerable money and time in educating the people” about the “superior quality” of Carson Valley’s butter. Those efforts evidently worked; Carson Valley Creamery won gold medals for their butter at the San Francisco mid-winter fair in 1894, 1903 and 1904.

At its height in 1897, the Creamery processed an astonishing 1 million pounds of local milk, and distributed profits of $116,000 to its shareholders. After that banner year, however, its business began to decline as additional creameries formed and jumped into the market. By 1909 there were a total of three creameries competing with each other in the valley.

The Carson Valley Creamery underwent reorganization in later years, becoming a “co-op” instead of a stock-and-shareholder organization. As the newspaper diplomatically put it, this took place “after the farmers had suffered considerable loss through [the] privately-owned concern.”

Finally on May 1, 1914, after 22 years in business, the old creamery was forced to close its doors “simply because dairying here is not sufficient to support two creameries.” The Minden Creamery had won the lion’s share of the business. (And by 1924, the Minden Creamery was still successfully putting out 2,200 pounds of butter every day of the week.)

The Creamery’s large wooden building was later purchased by peddler Isaac Goldstein, who converted it into a general merchandise store. Today it is filled only with memories.

If you happen to visit, keep an eye out for a small house just to the north of this fascinating old structure; this dwelling was once owned by the early Henningsen ranching family. And across the road from the old Creamery once sat the home business of Adolph Rohlff, a blacksmith whose trade was said to suffer mightily from his too-frequent patronage of the Behrman saloon. But that’s another story!

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