Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/250

236 handling and care of milk and cream, and of the cream and butter in and out of the churn, are almost unknown to thousands of butter-makers, and more especially to the private, non-professional ones among these, who are in the great majority. The engineers have their mechanical colleges and their schools of technology, the doctors have their medical schools, and the druggists their pharmacy colleges, but the dairy farmers have had practically no place where they could receive instruction in the theory and practice of butter and cheese making. I am aware that there have been agricultural colleges in the United States since 1855, but as far as practical instruction in dairying is concerned a good many of them might as well not have existed at all, if I do not radically misjudge the situation. Lectures in dairying, in which the principles of butter-making were to be taught, were certainly included in the curricula of some of the colleges, under the charge of the Professor of Agriculture, but this gentleman most likely also had charge of the feeding and breeding of farm animals, cultivation of crops, soil physics, farm management, and other studies. It is not strange that the attention given to dairy matters and to the manufacture of dairy products could only be very scant under these conditions. There were so many important problems to be taken up and discussed in relation to general agricultural topics that time would not permit entering into details, even if the professor had the inclination to do so.

This state of affairs led to the establishment of separate schools for instruction in dairying, especially in the manufacture of butter and cheese. Such schools have existed in Europe for a number of years; here they were not introduced until four years ago, when the Wisconsin Dairy School was founded as a separate department of the Agricultural College of the University of Wisconsin. So spontaneous was the growth of this school, and so rapid the adoption of the system in many other States of the Union, that it surprised the most ardent supporters of the movement.

The Wisconsin Dairy School dates from January, 1890, when a short dairy course was arranged for students taking the winter course in the College of Agriculture; two out of the twenty-seven agricultural students took this dairy course. The following year, when the course was greatly widened and the dairy school proper organized, seventy-two students entered, crowding the quarters of the school to the very utmost. The Wisconsin Legislature having in 1891 appropriated twenty-five thousand dollars for a separate dairy-school building, the work was at once pushed forward; where a crop of corn was taken off the ground in September, 1891, a neat, substantial edifice was erected, the first story of which was ready for occupancy in January, 1892, and in March the first class