Originally published in The Vidette-Messenger of Porter County on November 23, 1935.
Porter County Once Was Site of Thriving Cheese Plant; Pioneer Ell Pinney Relates Is History
(BY ROBERT ALLETT)
Few people living today can remember when east Porter county was the center of a thriving cheese industry that annually converted thousands of pounds of milk from herds in that vicinity into a delicacy that served the middle west.
Located on Crooked Creek on Snake Island, one and a half miles north of where State Road 30 now runs, and slightly to the northwest of Wanatah, the “cheese factory” is an institution long since forgotten even by Porter county’s oldest residents. No written record of the business is available, and no landmark remains to designate the exact spot where the factory stood. A wealthy landholder named Ruell Starr owned Snake Island and Joe Cromer was the manager of the establishment which was at least partly controlled by James McGill. Beyond that, names of men who ran the establishment have faded from memory of Porter county’s earlier historians.
Ell Pinney yesterday recalled the time when he, accompanied by his father, Horace Pinney, and his brothers, Kay and Jay, whose names, Mr. Pinney explained smiling, were the result of a large family in which there “were so many children we had to use the alphabet to name them.” made daily trips to the cheese factory to dispose of their milk. This was at least ten years before the death of the elder Pinney which occurred in 1880.
“Sixty-five years is a long time for a man to remember names of people he wasn’t interested in,” said Mr. Pinney when asked about the men who ran the cheese concern. Mrs. Oresta Freer, a neighbor, supplied much of the information obtained. Mrs. Freer, not as old as Mr. Pinney, held faint recollections of the old timers and their activities. In her youth Mrs. Freer taught in a one-room school near here and remembers Dr. G.H. Stoner as “a bright little shaver.”
It was agreed by Mrs. Freer and Mr. Pinney that the cheese factory was built on the site of a mill race which had been installed by Mr. Starr but never used. No one knows just what became of the factory, but it is believed that when Harry Dolson started a similar business at Wanatah in about 1875 he took over the Crooked Creek concern. This venture lasted only a few years, however, and cheese making in Porter county was a thing of the past. Individual farmers turned their milk into butter, selling large quantities to the Chicago area.
Mrs. Freer told of hearing her father, Elias Sherman, one of the county’s earliest known settlers, speak of buying cattle at the Crooked Creek center which was evidently used as a sort of livestock trading post.
Mr. Pinney, interested in the coming Centennial celebration next year, remarked that one of the stories his father, who settled here just 100 years ago, told was of meeting a band of Indians being driven west as he was returning to his farm from a trip to Valparaiso. Swamps and underbrush made the journey to the county seat an affair of major proportions in those days.
An interesting sidelight into the first years of Valparaiso university was given by Mr. Pinney who attended the Valparaiso university was given by Mr. Pinney who attended the Valparaiso Normal School under Brown and Kinsey in 1878. Unlike the system today under which text books in all schools are changed almost annually, Mr. Pinney remembers that at that time one used any volume he could lay his hands on and it was a rare occurrence when two students in a class possessed the same text by the same author.
Asked how Thanksgiving was celebrated in those days, Mr. Pinney replied with a twinkle in his eye, “Same as we do knowーate all we could!”
