America's Favorite Beverage Comes Clean

It's 1864 and Gail Borden's condensed milk is available to the soldiers fighting the Civil War.  With his son, John Gail fighting for the North and his other son, Lee, fighting with the Texas Calvary for the South, Borden's condensed milk was only purchased by the Union Army as field rations.  The New York plant was producing 16,000 quarts a day, but Borden could not keep up with demand.  By the end of 1866, another plant in Elgin, Illinois was purchasing a 300,000 gallons of milk each year from farmers.

Gail Borden died in 1875, but his company and his strict standards of quality did not.  The Borden Company began selling fresh whole milk in 1876, but compared to today's methods, delivery was still crude.  Bacteria tests were still unknown and sanitation was confined to the factory processing plant.  Once it left the factory, the milk was delivered by ladling out a customer's order from a common can.

By 1885 John Gail Borden was at the helm of Borden and instituted the process of bottling milk.  It was another decade before Louis Pasteur would introduce "pasteurization" to reduce bacteria in processed milk, and another 20 years before there was a test to detect tuberculosis in cows which would reduce the danger of passing that disease on to children.  Medical commissions were created state by state to "certify milk" and that would lead to healthier processing and delivery of one of America's favorite beverages.

Gail Borden had done his part 60 years before in seeing the need for cleanliness and humane standards in his company.  Farmers were educated in how to handle milk so that it could be offered to the public without "filthy milk" practices.  The infant mortality rate from drinking milk was greatly reduced and we have Gail Borden to thank for that.

Next time...Canning foods
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On September 30,] 1822, Joseph Marion Hernandez becomes the first Hispanic elected to Congress, in fact he was the first non-white person to serve at the highest levels of any of the three branches of the American federal government.  That long ago, hmmm. I think we might have forgotten?