While the making of butter and cheese might seem to be an unremarkable activity in most rural communities, butter-and cheese-making by these farmers of non-Southern origins was in fact exceptional in the South. One of Frederick Law Olmsted’s complaints during his travels through the antebellum South was the scarcity of butter, despite all the cows he saw. Even among plantation owners, he said, “as for butter, some have heard of it, some have seen it, but few have eaten it.” Hard data support his conclusions about the scarcity of butter in the antebellum South despite an abundance of cows. In 1860s, the South had 40 percent of all the dairy cows in the country, but produced just 20 percent of the butter and only one percent of the cheese.
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In 1858 the dairies producing whole milk for the city of Louisville, Kentucky, were described as ‘probably as well conducted as any in the country,’ but almost without exception managed by Swiss or German operatives....
... a newspaper in South Carolina said in 1857: “Good butter is indeed a luxury to almost every planter in the Southern country, and there is, perhaps, no one article of food that is more eagerly sought after.” In antebellum Virginia, a Richmond newspaper likewise complained of the scarcity of good butter, saying that the quality of butter available in the local market “would hardly be thought good enough to grease a cart-wheel.” When considering legislation to try to remedy the situation, a member of the Virginia legislator attributed the poor quality of that state’s butter to the carelessness with which Virginia farmers prepared it.
One reason for the contrast between the abundance of butter and cheese produced by German farmers in states like Wisconsin, for example, and the scarcity of butter and cheese in the South was that German farmers, wherever they were located, tended to build fences and huge barns for their livestock, and to feed them during the winter. Southerners more often let their cows and hogs roam freely during the winter even though this meant that in the spring they turned up half starved and it took the summer for them to put on normal weight.