Orange Dairy Company
Orange, Orange County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Clyde Spears established the Orange Dairy Company at this site in 1941, where he pasteurized and bottled 800 gallons of milk every day. The Orange Dairy Company collected raw milk from at least 16 local dairies, including the Peveto family and the Eddleman family’s Moonglow Dairy, which supposedly milked its cows by the light of the moon. The two-story red brick building retains many features of the original dairy processing plant, including the ceiling hooks which held a cooling system. Ceramic tiles, which were originally installed at the dairy for sanitary purposes, still cover the walls and floor. But in the postwar economy, Orange’s thriving dairy industry could no longer operate on a small scale. The necessity of pasteurization, as well as the invention of new milking technologies like the Rotolactor, significantly raised operating costs. At the same time, better refrigeration and lowered transportation costs brought Orange into competition with dairies as far away as Wisconsin. Even a 1945 city ordinance requiring all milk sold in Orange to be pasteurized in Orange could not save the local dairies. The number of dairy cows in Texas, which had been slowly growing through the first half of the 20th century, plummeted 80 percent between 1945 and 1971. The Orange Chamber of Commerce boasted in 1940 that its dairies had produced one and a half million gallons of milk, but by 1953 most of this production had to be dumped because it cost twice as much as out-of-state milk. Borden, a nationwide dairy company with Texas roots, bought out and closed the Orange Dairy Company in 1948.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Clyde Spears opened the Orange Dairy Company here in 1941, pasteurizing and bottling some 800 gallons of milk a day gathered from sixteen local dairies, among them the Moonglow Dairy said to milk by moonlight. The two-story brick plant still shows its cooling-system ceiling hooks and sanitary tile. But postwar economics—costly pasteurization, new milking machines, cheaper refrigerated shipping, and out-of-state competition as far as Wisconsin—doomed small dairies, and Borden bought out and closed the company in 1948.
Why it matters
The plant captures the swift collapse of local, small-scale dairying under mid-century industrial consolidation, a pattern that reshaped American agriculture nationwide.
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Related people
- · Clyde Spears
Themes & tags
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