Cheesemaking in the home was a common practice in the Eastern Townships before the introduction of the factory system. The implements which were used are shown in the inset of this photograph. In the middle is a barrel-type butter churn. On the right is a cradle which when covered with a cloth was used for draining whey from the curds used in cheesemaking. On the left is a cheese box. Relatively little homemade cheese was made for export but increasing British demand stimulated the proliferation of cheese factories beginning in the 1860s. Townships' farmers were at a disadvantage vis-a-vis their Ontario competitors because poor roads hindered centralization and therefore quality control. This was particularly true of the more isolated townships in Compton. The small, rather dilapidated factory shown here at La Patrie around the turn of the century had long since been outdated, even in the western section of the Eastern Townships. La Patrie's first cheese factory, opening in 1881, was operated by a group of farmers acting as a cooperative. It passed into the hands of an individual proprietor ten years later. Under the proprietor system, farmers received the full selling value of the cheese, less a fixed rate per pound to cover cost and profit.
Lacking adequate cooling facilities on their farms, farmers at first delivered their milk morning and evening. They unloaded their large cans on a covered platform, such as the one shown here at the front of the building. After the milk was weighed it was placed in vats where it was heated at 29.5C, with rennet added as a curdling agent. The liquid was then siphoned off and the curds cooled, washed, salted and finally compressed for about twenty hours, The end product was conveyed to the drying and curing room (seen here at the rear) where it was aged until the fall when the cheesemaking season ended and the summer's production was moved out, usually in a single shipment. Early cheese factories were unsanitary because spilled milk penetrated the wooden floors, curing rooms had no temperature control, and whey was generally dumped into a nearby stream or fed to pigs kept on the premises.
The cheese industry became much more important than butter manufacturing in Canada partly because its product was less perishable and thus more suitable for export, and partly because the comparative ease of making homemade butter discouraged the factory system and quality control. Nevertheless the Eastern Townships, by North American standards, had a good reputation as a producer of homemade butter and relatively high prices were obtained on the American and British markets. In fact, when butter factories began to appear during the 1880s, the resulting decline in demand for the homemade product put isolated counties such as Compton at the same disadvantage they had faced with cheese production twenty years earlier. This helps to explain why Compton farmers continued to raise beef cattle while the trend in eastern Canada was increasingly towards daily farming.
Courtesy: Aldage Rancourt, La Patrie Compton County Museum, and National Film Board of Canada
