“The Rise and Decline of the Cheese Industry in Lorain County”
The Rise and Decline of
The Cheese Industry
In Lorain County
By FRANK C. VAN CLEEF*
THE SECTION OF OHIO NOW KNOWN AS LORAIN COUNTY was
first settled about 1820. The ensuing three decades saw the
southerly and westerly portion of the Western Reserve being
cleared of forests and the land put into pastures and meadows.
The soil, the topography, and the climate proved to be quite
ideally adapted to dairy farming.
And so this entire section in a period of thirty to forty
years was converted from a wilderness into a vigorous dairy-
farming country sprinkled with growing settlements and com-
munity centers at five mile intervals. These villages were
quite generally patterned after the New England towns from
which the original settlers came. This pattern, so laid out,
was to continue for almost a hundred years with only super-
ficial modifications. Each year these energetic, resourceful,
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* Frank C. Van Cleef is a resident of Oberlin, Ohio.
His article is taken from a paper delivered before the Lorain County Historical
Society on January 13, 1958. By way of preface to his paper he related some of
the circumstances connecting him with the subject: “My maternal grandparents
migrated from New England to Huntington, Ohio, in 1833, and the entire family
participated in the development of the industry. My grandfather Van Cleef
migrated from New York state to Wellington, Ohio, in 1849 to perform his
contract to furnish the ties for the Big Four railroad from Grafton to Crestline,
Ohio. My father was cashier, secretary, and treasurer of the Horr Warner
Company from 1876 until his retirement from business in 1913. Most of the
persons mentioned in the story were personally known to me, and I was prac-
tically reared in the midst of the cheese industry. I even added milk books
kept by each factory as a record of milk received.”
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The advent of cheese industry and its growth indirectly explains about the quality of human development in any country. While growth of cheese industry is a welcome factor, the decline may be due to different factors. Hope it would pick up again in the days to come.