COMMENTARY: Remembering The Carnation Milk Plant

COURTESY PHOTO ROGERS HISTORICAL MUSEUM 
The Carnation Milk Plant at 206 W. Birch about 1950. Notice all of the trucks used to pick up milk cans from more than 1,200 area farmers. Today the complex is the home of Wildwood Auction Company.

COURTESY PHOTO ROGERS HISTORICAL MUSEUM The Carnation Milk Plant at 206 W. Birch about 1950. Notice all of the trucks used to pick up milk cans from more than 1,200 area farmers. Today the complex is the home of Wildwood Auction Company.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

— Folks passing the big concrete complex at 206 W. Birch St., between the railroad tracks and Third Street, may wonder about its history.

The huge building and smokestack were built in 1928 and opened in 1929 as Barnes Dairy Products. The Great Depression began, and the company went bankrupt.

At the time, the plant was said to be the largest milk plant in the state and was buying more than a million pounds of whole milk per month. The plant reopened in 1930 and operated until 1935 under various names with the principle products being powdered milk and butter.

A new chapter began when the Carnation Co. bought the plant, installed new equipment and received the first raw milk on April 16, 1935. Carnation evaporated the raw milk into condensed milk and shipped it to Mount Vernon, Mo., for canning. In the 1950s, the raw milk was collected, weighed, tested and cooled in the Rogers plant before being shipped out in tanker trucks.

By 1956, the plant could process 32,000 pounds of milk per hour and was managed by Willard Davis with Charles Hawkins as the field agent.

Carnation sold its interest in the Rogers plant in September 1962 to Standard Milk Co. of Aurora, Mo. The personnel had dwindled to about seven people, but the plant continued to gather and process milk and ship it to a Pet Milk plant in Neosho, Mo., until 1966.

As usual, I wanted first-hand information from folks who were involved with the milk plant. Unfortunately, most are deceased. An appeal for help on local websites produced some wonderful memories.

Coach Gene Bland, Rogers High School, class of 1952: “I grew up a block away from the Carnation plant. We neighborhood kids had a pretty good football team (the Carnation Reds) that played cross-town teams on the lush lawn, west side of the plant (We had to avoid the flagpole in the middle of the lawn). Also on hot days, workers often invited us into the plant and gave us bottles of cold, rich milk straight from the storage tanks.”

Billy Ash, a third-generation milk hauler whose dad and granddad drove route trucks picking up milk from local farmers, explained the system: “Each route had a number. My granddad’s was 700; my dad’s was 2500. Each patron (farmer) had a number, for example 2532. This designated which route as well as which patron on that route. This number was painted on each milk can, so when it went through the plant, it was weighed, the milk tested and recorded to determine how much they were paid for their milk, and the (farmer) received a check twice a month.”

Danny R. Jones: “My dad, Jimmy Jones, hauled milk in the mid- to late-1950s … He had a route in the Pea Ridge and Garfield area, and picked up milk from both of my grandparents: Chauncey and Vivian Jones in the Twelve Corners area and O.B. and Daisy Collins, who lived on Highway 94 near Tucks Chapel Road."

"I was born in 1956, and when my mother returned to work at Daisy BB guns, after my birth, I rode in the truck with my dad. We joked about me getting my diaper changed twice a day, once at my Jones grandparents at Twelve Corners and once at my Collins grandparents near Tucks Chapel before heading to the Carnation milk plant in Rogers. Dad quit hauling milk for Carnation when the plant closed.”

Danny Jones is a third-generation milk hauler who picked up milk from local patrons and families for Kraft and other companies for plants in other cities. He retired last year.

Ben Khone grew up near the Carnation plant in the 1940s and ’50s. “The milk plant had a long track with rollers and rails about 100 feet long that brought the empty milk cans from inside the plant back to the area where the drivers picked them up and returned them to the farmers for refilling. Us kids would get on the cans and ride them down the chute like a roller coaster. We had great fun until an employee came out of the plant and ran us off.”

In 1966 the plant closed and ended the era of processing powdered and condensed milk in Rogers.

Just a few blocks away on West Sycamore Street, the Sunbeam Dairy, which mostly processed and bottled homogenized milk, was also fading and closed just two years later.

JAMES F. HALES IS A LOCAL AUTHOR AND HISTORIAN. HIS COLUMN APPEARS MONTHLY IN THE ROGERS MORNING NEWS.