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.
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