By Jim Coogan
Original post Apr 26, 2018
I'm not sure how many cows there are on Cape Cod today. No doubt there are a few here and there. I'm willing to bet, however, that few are being used to produce milk - certainly not on any large scale. At one time - and it wasn't that long ago, there were a lot of dairy cows on Cape Cod and the milk we drank was produced from local farms.
Where I grew up in Brewster in the 1950s, there was a dairy farm in our neighborhood. Ollie Lund ran a herd of maybe 15-20 cows, mostly Holsteins and Guernseys just off Main Street. In good weather he would drive them down to a pasture about a half mile away on Lower Road. What little traffic there was back then, patiently waited for the animals to get out of the road before continuing to wherever they were going. It was representative of the kind of slow-paced life that seemed to sum up much of that decade. Lund called his enterprise Pine Ridge Dairy, eventually moving from the Main Street location to a much larger piece of land in East Brewster. At its height, the farm had almost 200 regular customers from Orleans to East Dennis. My best friend's father delivered milk to our house in glass bottles. There was always about an inch or more of cream on the top that my father would put in his coffee. Lund had the contract to supply milk for the school lunches at the Brewster Elementary School. Before paper cartons, I remember a lot of half-pint glass bottles being knocked over accidentally and broken during lunch and custodian Frank Robbins had to get the mop out to clean up. He wasn't too happy to have to come out of his warm space next to the boiler room.
In that period more than a half century ago, there were about a half-dozen large- and small-scale farming operations across the Cape devoted to producing milk. In Sandwich, the Roberti family had a large parcel of land along Tupper Road where from the 1920s to the mid-1970s the family supplied milk to parts of the Upper Cape. In 1935, Route 6A was built right through the farm necessitating a tunnel to get the cows to a second pasture. By the 1950s the Robertis had a barn large enough to hold 40 cows. It was still there until a few years ago. They bought extra land to grow their own feed. Hay was hand-pitched into wagons and at its peak the farm was delivering 500-600 quarts of homogenized milk each day.
Mystic Lake Farm, which was listed as "Cape Cod's Largest Dairy," was a 92-acre property located on Race Lane in Marstons Mills. The Hord family supplied homogenized and pasteurized milk, cottage cheese, butter, and eggs to the mid-Cape region and sections of Falmouth. Elizabeth and Hjalmar Jensen operated a dairy farm in Hatchville from the mid-1930s through the early 1950s. The farm was on land leased from the Coonamessett Ranch Company and had about three dozen cows. Truro had the Highland Dairy in North Truro which was run by Irving and Sumner Horton. A number of small dairy farms were located in Provincetown which up until the mid-1950s had a population of over 4,000 year-round residents. Nauset Moors Farm was another dairy farm in Eastham. It operated until about 1950.
The local dairy industry began its decline in the 1960s as more stringent state health regulations forced a number of small operations to close. But it was the increasing cost of labor and machinery coupled with skyrocketing prices for open land on the Cape that ended it. Today, if you ask little kids where milk comes from, they'll scratch their heads for a moment before telling you that it's made at Cumberland Farms.
Do you have memories of the Lund’s Brewster dairy farm?