The Historic UT Creamery

How the University of Tennessee Changed Knoxville’s Relationship with Ice Cream

Note: Author Patrick Ramey is a doctoral student in U.S. History at the University of Tennessee.

My grandfather used to tell me that Neapolitan ice cream took him back to hot summer birthday parties on cheap wicker porch furniture. His father was a cost engineer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. He did not have nor need a college degree for that job, and he and his family—including my grandfather, his older sister, their mother, and a series of dachshunds —lived in a prewar suburb of wood-sided, craftsmen bungalows set on dirt roads outside of Chattanooga. Many of those are now demolished and buried under the asphalt of strip mall parking lots along Brainerd and Germantown roads, just east of Missionary Ridge.

That memory is an artifact of East Tennessee’s history. Many of us can relate to the feeling of eating supermarket ice cream from the kitchen freezer outside on a hot summer day. My grandfather’s parents could not have. Such a pastime would have been impossible for most people only a few decades earlier. Electric refrigeration, the supermarket, and America’s full adoption of the automobile were all developments that influenced his most mundane childhood memories in a way somewhat alien to previous generations—not unlike Instagram and oat milk lattes today.

It turns out that ice cream is an appropriate metric for gauging the processes that transformed East Tennessee in the first half of the twentieth century. The University of Tennessee played a role in the region’s transformation, too. The history of the UT Creamery begins to illuminate how my grandfather came to associate ice cream with cheap in the 1940s.

Fifty years before my grandfather was born, most East Tennessean’s commercial dairy consumption consisted of butter and buttermilk. Why? The high milk fat made them less perishable. Buttermilk lasted two or three days longer than sweet milk without spoiling—and longer when kept in a cool stream on a summer day or a frosty windowsill in the winter. These were the products that dairy students at the University of Tennessee started manufacturing for sale in Knoxville as early as 1881, the year that the University acquired its first dairy herd. University dairy workers delivered those products to market on a two-horse wagon—the first of many compelling transport modes the Creamery employed over nearly a century of continuous operation.

 

 

In 1915, the University opened the UT Cooperative Creamery out of a dairy barn located where Morgan Hall is now. The Creamery purchased surplus cream—that sweet, buttery stuff skimmed from the top of unhomogenized milk—from dairies across East Tennessee, who in turn shipped their cream via rail to UT. Graduating from horse-drawn wagons, Creamery workers picked up orders of cream in the back of a Model T half-ton truck. The Cooperative Creamery also sold raw milk out of buckets to local customers, the proceeds from which supported the wages for student workers.

 

 

The University of Tennessee’s Cooperative Creamery was an impressive venture that manufactured butter at a rate of thousands of pounds a year. On July 22, 1915, the Knoxville Sentinel reported that the Creamery had fulfilled an order of ten thousand pounds of butter to be shipped to a commercial seller in Norfolk, Va. by rail. It was also altruistic, since the Creamery’s profits were redistributed to their suppliers. In this way, the Creamery modeled the University’s scheme during the Progressive Era to modernize the state by educating its rural populations to manufacture the state’s natural resources into profitable, exportable products.

 

 

But what about ice cream? Well, Knoxvillians have a long history of ice cream consumption dating back to decades before the University began its agricultural programs. German-born Peter Kern’s Bakery sold hand-cranked ice cream as early as 1865—and there’s evidence of earlier ice cream entrepreneurs, including a Mexican War veteran referred to as “Capt. Council” who operated an “ice cream saloon” in Knoxville in the 1840s. By the 1890s, however, popular drug and retail locations advertised ice cream frequently in city newspapers. In addition to Kern’s Bakery, Kuhlman’s Drug Stores and Wingert’s pharmacy—both on Gay Street—operated ice cream counters for hungry consumers.

 

At the turn of the twentieth century, advances in the artificial ice industry made ice cream accessible to more consumers. Until the 1870s, Knoxville’s ice industry hinged on importing natural ice in the winter to store in insulated ice houses until warmer months. Sometime in the early 1880s, the Knoxville Ice Company began manufacturing ice for delivery from its facility in what is now the World’s Fair Park, along Cumberland Avenue. Their presence is documented in the bird’s eye map of Knoxville printed in 1886.

On February 15, 1890, one journalist reported in the Sentinel that Knoxville investors would build another artificial ice factory within the year. He gleefully anticipated that “mint claret punch will not be tepid next summer or iced tea an unattainable luxury.” Sometime between 1890 and 1902, more artificial ice manufacturers—including Crystal Ice Company, then located in north Knoxville—began selling through the City Delivery Company in bulk quantities.

Affordable, artificial ice made it practical for consumers to store ice cream in their home for longer periods of time. John Cruze advertised the sale of refrigerators and ice-cream freezers in 1898. He was one of many vendors—including Cullen & Gammon—that sold these “summer necessities” at the turn of the century. Around the same time, recipes for homemade ice cream became more prevalent in newspapers; the May 17^th, 1899, issue of the Sentinel lists two strawberry ice cream recipes with the instructions to “freeze carefully.” This was a fair warning, because the mix needed to be hand-cranked consistently for several minutes or it risked freezing unevenly.

In the mid-1920s, Economy Drug Store advertised the home delivery of “Double Rich,” “Full Quart Brick” ice cream. The 1920s may have been the first period when commercially made ice cream could be delivered directly to consumers’ kitchen ice boxes and stored—with a regular supply of home-delivered, artificial ice—for later consumption on front-porch wicker in the summer heat.

Those transformations take us back to the University of Tennessee Creamery, which by then had moved into a state-of-the-art dairy manufacturing facility on the first floor of Morgan Hall. It also operated a small “dairy cafeteria” adjacent to the production facility that served student-made products. By the 1920s, ice cream was reaching new heights of demand in Knoxville. Not only was ice cream more accessible, but ice cream counters filled the social void in Knoxville created by Prohibition. The University of Tennessee’s Creamery, established in 1915 to help local dairies create more value from their products, evolved with consumer demand to fulfill that purpose.

“Prof” Thomas B. Harrison joined the University of Tennessee’s dairy faculty in 1925 and started making ice cream. The Creamery was no longer a cooperative asset for local dairymen, but offered educational opportunities in dairy manufacturing during an era when it was becoming rapidly more sophisticated. Thomas Harrison oversaw the UT Creamery until 1964 and educated a series of prominent regional dairy producers during his career. Thomas B. Mayfield was a University of Tennessee dairy student until 1941, when he joined the Navy during the Second World War. He would later be a significant leader of Mayfield Dairy.

 

 

By the end of the Second World War, Knoxville consumers enjoyed abundant access to affordable, pasteurized dairy products. The University of Tennessee Creamery was one of several dairy manufacturing facilities in Knoxville that bought raw milk and processed it into butter, cheese, milk and ice cream. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Knoxville Health Department implemented a controversial series of regulations to curb the consumption of contaminated milk. Fewer people got sick, but it drove many small, disgruntled dairies out of business. Some, who continued to sell milk informally to employees and neighbors, were now labeled “bootleggers” for “smuggling” illegal milk. As a result, Knoxville’s commercial dairy industry consolidated into a select few producers who composed the Knoxville Dairy Producers Association. This consolidation irked many grocers and small dairies.

Cas Walker mounted a vicious attack against the Knoxville Dairy Producers Association alleging they were “fixing” milk prices in his stores. In the late summer of 1940, Walker accused the Knoxville Dairy Producers Association of intentionally shortening the supply of milk in a series of scathing advertisements. Some went as far as to liken the Knoxville Dairy Producers to fascist dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. As a retail alternative to the “dairy dictatorship,” he beckoned directly to Knoxville’s housewives (evidently the conventional grocery shopper at that time) to buy raw milk at a lower price from his stores. By 1950, selling raw milk was illegal and the high cost of pasteurization led many small dairies to sell or fold into mass-producing dairies. Walker continued buying and processing local milk, but the cost of pasteurization made it increasingly difficult for him to maintain a low price point.

 

During this period, the University of Tennessee Creamery offered dairy short courses to help dairies meet those new standards. From 1938-1946, The Volunteer ran a promotional ad for the Creamery as “The Most Up to Date Dairy Manufacturing Laboratory in the South” and the Knoxville Health Bureau Consistently ranked the University of Tennessee’s Creamery amongst the Grade “A” pasteurizing plants throughout the mid-twentieth century. As dairy manufacturing became increasingly regulated and complex, the Creamery functioned as an educational asset for dairies trying to reach consumers.

By the time the University invested, again, in state-of-the-art commercial dairy manufacturing facilities in 1949 with the construction of McCord Hall and the Dairy Processing Building, state and University officials were brimming with optimism about the state dairy industry’s trajectory. This optimism was well-placed, given Carson Brewer’s article in the “This is Your City” column of the Knoxville News-Sentinel, published in the Sunday paper on October 27, 1957. The article headline reads “Knoxvillians Drink More Milk than Beer.” Come to find out, Brewer reported that Knoxvillians were drinking more than three times as much milk as beer per year. Information he received from city health officer L.A. Brendle and city milk inspector H.M. Hayes, a UT dairy graduate. At that point, Knoxville dairying fully conformed with national public health standards.

The Dairy Processing Building and McCord Hall also represented the demand growth for dairy products on campus at the beginning of a period of massive growth for the university over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to operating a small retail counter out of the Dairy Processing Building on Neyland Drive, the UT Creamery supplied university cafeterias, dormitories, and the hospital. Additionally, UT Creamery workers continued delivering to Knoxville grocers and residents until the 1970s.

 

 

Postwar suburbanization heavily altered consumer behaviors in Knoxville, and across the country. Although many Americans had relied on home delivery service for dairy products since turn of the twentieth century, suburbanization disrupted its profitability. Automobiles, refrigerators, milk pasteurization and supermarkets made milk more accessible and less perishable than before. As a result, commercial dairies began cancelling their increasingly unprofitable delivery routes. By 1979, the UT Creamery, Mayfield, and Pet Dairy Group had stopped making residential deliveries. Avondale Farms Creamery continued to make home deliveries in north Knoxville, even after it was purchased by Biltmore Dairy Farms in 1980, which was again purchased by Pet in 1985. Then, Charles Coomer—a third generation milkman—bought Pet’s milk routes and continued supplying them independently until he retired in 1999. Interestingly, Coomer grew up delivering raw milk from his family dairy. When it became illegal to sell raw milk, around 1950, they sold their farm and began running deliveries for Avondale.

 

 

I interviewed Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist Sam Venable about his experiences working in the UT Creamery as a forestry student in the 1960s and he recalled just how integrated the UT Creamery was into the Knoxville community. Venable drove UT Creamery trucks through Sequoyah Hills to make residential deliveries and to the White Stores in Bearden and on Cumberland Avenue.  He even shared about the “total mess” he created when driving around a curve too quickly, causing gallons of milk cartons to burst from behind him and teaching him a valuable life lesson to pump the brakes when approaching a tight bend. Sometime after his experience, the University agreed to support other local dairies by stopping UT Creamery deliveries off campus. Until the Creamery closed in 1989, however, Creamery workers delivered its products to the UT Hospital, cafeterias and dormitories in addition to selling out of the dairy processing building to the public.

 

 

The Creamery maintained a small customer base after it stopped off-campus deliveries. Tommy Burch—former manager of the Creamery from 1985 to 1989—remembered a time when former Governor Winfield Dunn was on campus on a hot summer day. “He detoured in the creamery and sat down there for 30 minutes and had a cup of peach ice cream with us.” Ann Henry, who worked in the Creamery as a secretary during that time said it was “pretty common” for customers to come in and buy ice cream but described the retail counter inside the front entrance of the Dairy Processing Building as tucked in between the production facility and the administrative offices. Creamery customers were not walking into an ice cream parlor, but a “fun place to work,” a social workspace where customers could pop in for an impromptu cup of ice cream with friendly staff members, or to pick up larger quantities to share with their families at home.

Outside of celebrity detours, the students and faculty loved UT ice cream. Every year, Burch made five-ounce cups for the annual faculty picnic. “The peach I started making was a favorite…[and] the folks at the faculty club went crazy over black raspberry.” In the end, the Creamery closed in 1989 because it could no longer survive in a commercial dairy industry where low prices forced producers to manufacture dairy products on a massive scale to remain profitable.

The Creamery wouldn’t have stayed open until 1989 without help from other dairies. In the late 1980s, the UT Creamery was selling its surplus cream to Kay’s Ice Cream’s plant on Western Avenue and producing cheddar cheese using loaned equipment. It was larger shifts and consolidation in the dairy industry—partly driven by the Creamery’s own success as an educational asset in earlier decades—that led administrators to close it rather than to invest in new facilities to meet the rapidly advancing commercial standard.

The Creamery’s value was always intended to be educational, and it continued to serve local dairies as an educational resource after it closed. In 1996, John Harrison of Sweetwater Valley Farm reached out to the University of Tennessee’s College of Agriculture about learning how to make cheese. He was connected to Tommy Burch, who helped John develop a cheese operation that could meet the emerging consumer demand for a local, farm-to-table product.

For its last several decades of operation, the UT Creamery had also been a farm-to-table operation. But in the 1980s, there still wasn’t a viable market for premium, farm-to-table dairy products. Kevin Debusk, who worked in the Creamery in 1988 and 1989, informed me of this:

“We were farm-to table back then…People would come buy our product because it was a high-quality product. I think we took that for granted. Today, there’s value in marketing that. Had we been able to market the product back then like now, things might have been different… Back then, we couldn’t sell it for its true value.”

On August 13th, the UT Creamery will be celebrating the one-year anniversary of its reopening. Over the last year, Knoxvillians and University students visiting the Creamery’s retail location on Neyland Drive have enjoyed premium, hand-scooped ice cream produced, marketed, and sold by university students and faculty. This may signal another shift in the regional dairy industry. The commercial dairies of the mid-twentieth century are struggling, teeing up a new pathway for the region’s smaller dairies to connect with consumers eager for local products. This new iteration of the UT Creamery represents not a break from the past, but a continuation of its mission to help East Tennessee dairies meet continuously changing consumer demands.

It may seem far-fetched to frame something as ordinary as the half-gallon paper cartons of milk occupying the corner of every supermarket’s refrigerated section as artifacts. But those milk cartons tell a story. Their ubiquity was created. New trajectories in the dairy industry suggest that things will not be as they have been since the 1940s. In a way, I attended the same birthday celebrations in the first decade of the twenty-first century that my grandfather did in the 1940s. I am not sure if my grandchildren will recognize that memory with the same familiarity.

Patrick Ramey

 

Sources:

Horace C. Smith, Honored Calling: A History of the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources. Knoxville: Institute of Agriculture at the University of Tennessee. 1999.

Anne Cooper Funderburg, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla: A History of American Ice Cream. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. 1995.

Tennessee Museum of Agriculture, Nashville.

University of Tennessee Libraries, Special Collections.

University of Tennessee Libraries, Digital Collections, Volunteer Yearbooks.