the railroads brought country products to the
city while they were still at their best.
Modern Decline The modern decline of
cheesemaking has its roots in that same
golden age. Cheese and butter factories were
born in the United States, a country with no
cheesemaking tradition, just 70 years after the
Revolution. In 1851, an upstate New York
dairy farmer named Jesse Williams agreed to
make cheese for neighboring farms, and by
the end of the Civil War there were hundreds
of such “associated” dairies, whose economic
advantages brought them success throughout
the industrialized world. In the 1860s and
’70s, pharmacies and then pharmaceutical
companies began mass-producing rennet. At
the turn of the century scientists in Denmark,
the United States, and France brought more
standardization in the form of pure microbial
cultures for curdling and ripening cheese,
which had once been accomplished by the