Marin County has a long and rich history as a home to the dairy business. When San Francisco’s population exploded after the discovery of gold, many Swiss and Portuguese immigrants raised cattle and operated dairies in Marin that shipped butter, cheese and milk to the City from the ports of Tomales and Bolinas. By 1920, there were hundreds of individual dairies throughout the county.
One of the largest and most modern was the Meadowsweet Farms Dairy in what is now Corte Madera. Established in the early 1920’s, it sat nestled against the hills just south of what is now Tamalpais Rd. The dairy was the brainchild of Frank Keever and his wife Hazeltine Sherman. Frank was an engineer who had made a substantial fortune in the mining business and Hazeltine was the daughter of Harriet and Moses Sherman, a wealthy land developer and railway operator. The Shermans had previously bought 60 acres of land called ‘Overmarsh’ next to their home in Corte Madera. Keever had purchased a large tract of adjacent marshland and drained the area with a complex system of floodgates, creating over 1,400 acres of prime pastureland. Within a few years of their marriage in 1921, Frank and Hazeltine built the Meadowsweet Farms Dairy that became the model for modern dairy operations. They imported pure-bred Guernsey cows, purchased state-of-the-art milking machines, tested their stock for disease, and insisted on “ultra” sanitary conditions throughout the dairy operations. Meadowsweet originally produced Grade A Raw milk but expanded their product line over the years to include pasteurized milk, buttermilk, cottage cheese, butter and eggs. For the next 15 years, Meadowsweet Dairy was the principal industry in the area.
The Keevers divorced in 1937 and the dairy and delivery routes were sold to Hugh Porter in 1938 for $225,000 who modernized and expanded the operations and renamed it Marin Dell Dairy. The Meadowsweet Dairy name lived on, however as the Sherman’s kept their herd and had them shipped to Calexico where they operated “Meadowsweet Dairy” along the border of California and Mexico.
An interesting and somewhat amazing postscript to this story is that the young man who helped ship the stock to Calexico and would go on to be the new dairy’s manager for close to 20 years was one Paul Glud. Why, amazing? Because in 1931 when he was 22 the following appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Dairy Hand Was Gored By Bull – His left lung punctured by the horn of a bull suddenly gone mad, Paul Glud, 22, Corte Madera dairy employee is believed to be dying at Ross General Hospital. Fellow employees rescued him from the infuriated animal as it set itself for a second attack. Glud, an employee of the Meadowsweet Dairy at Corte Madera, attempted to beat down the attack with a heavy shovel as the bull charged.”
(Originally appeared as History Watch article in the Marin Independent Journal)