Hi-Ho the Dairy-Oh!
Exploring Rhode Island’s Rich Dairying History

In Rhode Island today there are 17 working dairy farms.

In 1880 there were 6,216.

Where did they all go?

What happens to a dairy farm when it ceases to be a dairy farm?

Does any trace of these enterprises remain?

Well, before we get to the answers to those questions, let’s address some aspects of Rhode Island’s dairy heritage.

Getting the cheese ball rolling

William Blackstone, Rhode Island’s first settler in 1635, may well have owned the first milk cows in the colony. When Roger Williams and his followers came here the following year, they likely brought some of their own, along with other livestock and seeds for planting. We do know that when European settlers came to Block Island in 1662, a cow was the first of them to set foot on the island. The humans who brought them, having no docking facilities, pushed their cattle overboard and forced them to swim to shore. The spot retains the name Cow Cove to this day.

From around the 1670s up to the time of the American Revolution, Cocumscussoc, near Wickford in North Kingstown, was the epicenter for cheese production in the northeast. That’s where Richard Smith Jr. and his family had a trading post and thousands of acres of good grazing land. Richard’s wife, Esther, is credited with getting the cheese ball rolling, beginning with small batches for her family’s use, and later trading surplus products to neighboring families or sending cheeses as gifts to important friends, like John Winthrop Jr., governor of Connecticut.

In a wonderful example of a “high tide lifting all boats,” the recipe was shared with neighboring farms and soon enough cheese was coming out of the Narragansett country to supply markets up and down the eastern seaboard, and as far away as Barbados.

Why cheese and not milk, you might ask? Well, without refrigeration milk can’t be transported more than a few miles from its point of origin. Cheese, however, survives exportation very well. Most families at that time (one source says nine out of 10) had at least one cow to supply their own milk, butter and cheese needs. But as towns grew and filled up with people who did not work the land for a living, so too did demand grow for farm products like cheese. By the time Richard Smith Jr. died in 1692 he was arguably the richest man in New England. It’s estimated that his 135 head of cattle could produce 15,000 pounds of cheese a year.

There were basically two kinds of cows in the northern colonies in those days: Dutch cows, which were productive but ill suited to the environment, and English cows, which were hardy but produced less milk.  Historians are unsure which type the Smiths had. One theory is that they bred the two together to create a hardy, high-yielding bovine.  So what did the cheese taste like? Unfortunately, despite the apparently widespread dissemination of the recipe, no copy survives today.  What we do know is that the cheese was referred to as “Cheshire” by contemporaries, and today’s Cheshire cheese is similar to cheddar. The actual recipe, however, was probably for a “Gloucester” cheese, as that is the region of England that Esther Smith originally hailed from.

A large portion of the diet of cows grazed along the western shore of Narragansett Bay was salt marsh hay, which lent a saltiness to products made from their milk. In this way a Gloucester cheese recipe using milk from Rhode Island cows could have yielded a Cheshire-style cheese. In any case, the quality was so much favored that decent cheese exported to the South from anywhere in New England was apt to be called “Rhode Island cheese.”

After the American Revolution, Connecticut overtook Southern Rhode Island as the cheese-making capital of the United States. Meanwhile, the lands owned by the Smiths continued to be used for dairying purposes, even as they passed through the hands of one family after another. In 1939 that tradition came to an end with the sale of Cocumcussoc Farm, a modernized dairy that sat on a small portion of the lands originally owned by the Smiths. Today most of the buildings of the former Cocumcussoc Farm are privately owned but Richard Jr.’s home still stands and is open to the public. You probably know it as Smith’s Castle, a house-museum where the property’s 370-year history is interpreted.

It’s in the evidence

Dairy farming, like any kind of agriculture as practiced before the advent of modern technology, does not leave much behind after it’s gone.  Barns fall down and decay, pastures revert to woodlands. At least one thing remains—the stone walls. Step into the woods almost anywhere in New England and you’ll soon come across several. Some were boundary markers or field borders. Others were specifically to keep animals in, or to keep them out; for instance, to keep the cows from eating the farmer’s wheat. Those designed to contain animals are generally made from larger stones and are taller and/or wider.

Though they were constructed before and after, stone walls had their heyday from 1775 to 1825. Prior to stone walls, New England farmers used various kinds of wooden fences, needing constant maintenance, to control their livestock. After barbed wire was invented in the 1870s farmers used it in place of stone walls. If you see barbed wire in the woods you can bet it once enclosed a pasture.

Parallel stone walls about 20 feet apart may denote a cattle path.  Remnants of such walls can be seen at Colt State Park in Bristol. A stone barn, built in the early 1900s to house Colonel Samuel P. Colt’s herd of prize Jersey cows, still stands there, as well.

Another relic from our agrarian history that you can see today is the pound. A pound is a stone enclosure held in common by a town or village for the purpose of restraining animals that have wandered off their owner’s property. I’m aware of four still in existence: one in Exeter on Ten Rod Road; one on Ministerial Road in South Kingstown; and one in each Foster (South Killingly Road) and Glocester (corner of Chopmist Hill and Pound Roads). A fifth one is rumored to be in Union Village in North Smithfield but I have yet to locate it.

Do you know how Ten Rod Road got its name? Because it was originally 10 rods wide—165 feet. The road needed to be that wide to allow farmers to drive their cattle to market.

Some dairy farms disappear but leave a larger legacy behind.  Vasilios S. Haseotes started his dairy farm in Cumberland in 1939 with only a cow named Bossy, a calf and a large wooded plot of land between Bear Hill and Fairhaven Roads. Today an industrial park stands where cows once grazed, suburban housing surrounds the houses built by the Haseotes family in the late 1950s, and I-295 slashes straight across the middle of their former 300-acre farm. The business begun by Haseotes and carried on by his sons and grandchildren survives, though. You know it as the Cumberland Farms chain of convenience stores.

Thirty dairy farms, purchased or taken by the City of Providence by eminent domain around 1921, lie under the waters of the Scituate Reservoir.

Part of what is now T. F. Green Airport was once one or more dairy farms.

The E. S. Crandall dairy farm on Morgan Avenue in Johnston is now Twin Willows riding stable, and at least part of the dairy’s former pasturelands are included in the new FM Global campus completed this year.

The 118-acre Chase Farm in Lincoln was a dairy farm for a hundred years prior to 1965, when it was purchased by the town and preserved as open space. Efforts are under way by the Friends of Hearthside to turn the 1885 farmhouse into a dairy farm museum.

Get ye to the dairy

Not all dairy farms have disappeared from the landscape. Arruda’s Dairy Farm in Tiverton has been around since 1917. You can buy fresh farm milk right from their storefront, walking distance from the milking parlor.  Wright’s Dairy Farm in North Smithfield, in business since around 1896, specialized in home delivery from 1900 until the 1970s when they built a retail store. The retail store then morphed into a full-service bakery where you can get pies, cakes, fresh real-whipped-cream pastries, Wright’s famous hermits, and of course, milk. The cows that gave the milk are over in the fields or in the barn—you can still watch the milking every day from 3 to 5 p.m.

Of the 18 dairy farms operating in Rhode Island today, five banded together in 2004 to form the Rhody Fresh Dairy Farm Cooperative, and more have joined since then. Initiatives like this, coupled with the growing locavore movement, will help ensure the survival of dairy farming in our state for many years to come. Rhode Island has a rich dairying history and it would be a shame to see it vanish.

Arruda’s Dairy Farm
408 Stafford Rd., Tiverton
401-624-8898

Wrights Dairy Farm
200Woonsocket Hill Rd., North Smithfield
877-227-9734 • 401-767-3014 • wrightsdairyfarm.com

Smith’s Castle
55 Richard Smith Dr.,Wickford
401-294-321 • smithscastle.org

Christopher Martin is the editor and publisher of Quahog.org, the definitive Rhode Island road trip. While he has never milked a cow, he did once ruin a good pair of hiking boots while helping his cousins muck out a dairy barn.