L. B. Halsey, a lawyer who married Sarah Frances Sheffield (daughter of the late John H. and Anne Maria Sheffield), became interested in the dairy business when called upon to help deliver his widowed mother-in-law’s butter. Through careful selection and breeding, the Sheffield herd of
Mahwah, New Jersey, produced superior milk, which in turn made fine butter. He began
marketing the butter in his spare time in the city and, by 1880, had given up the law to devote himself to the dairy trade. His first innovation was to design a covered
milk wagon that protected fluid milk from dust. Halsey trained other
farmers to improve the quality of their milk and bought milk only from the best
herds. , formerly a Sheffield Farms dairy plant, on 125th Street in New York City . In 1892, he installed the first
pasteurizing machine in the
United States, imported from
Germany, at Sheffield Farms’
Bloomville, New York plant. The following year, pasteurization was demonstrated at the
Columbian Exposition in
Chicago. Commercial milk pasteurization was introduced in
Baltimore in 1893, but
Cincinnati is credited with the first large-scale pasteurization program in America.
New York City followed in 1898, although pasteurization was not required for some years. Slawson Brothers entered the milk distribution business in 1866. Loton H. Horton (April 22, 1852 – December 15, 1926), a Slawson on his mother’s side, began driving a milk wagon for his uncle when he was 16. He quickly rose to lead the company, becoming a partner at the age of 21 and principal owner in 1898. When the company merged with T. W. Decker and Sheffield Farms, he became the new firm’s president: a post he held until his death in 1926. At that time, Sheffield Farms Co. (the name was eventually shortened from Sheffield Farms–Slawson–Decker) was the largest dairy products company in the world, with nearly 2,000 retail routes and over 300 stores, mostly in New York City. Just before his death, Horton had sold the company to the
National Dairy Products Corporation. It was formed in 1923 as a merger of several dairy concerns and continued to grow through acquisitions, the most important of which was the addition of Sheffield Farms. Others included Breyers Ice Cream, also purchased in 1926, and Kraft-Phenix Cheese Corporation, in 1930. All of the companies continued to operate independently, marketing products under their recognized brand names. In 1969, National Dairy Products became Kraftco and then Kraft in 1976. Horace S. Tuthill, Jr. retired in 1950 as a vice president of the Sheffield Farms Company in charge of sales and advertising, after thirty years with the company. Joseph A. Mulvihill and Michael J. Mulvihill worked for the company from the 1890's to 1950 in the New York City and Jamaica plants. There was also a store in Rockaway during the summer months. Since 1964, the Sheffield buildings on West 57th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in Manhattan have been the
CBS Broadcast Center. The company built the
Sheffield Farms Stable between 1903 and 1909. It was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places in 2005. ==References==