“It’s definitely safe to say that the earliest cheeses made in the Pacific Northwest were made in Clark County,” said Tami Parr.
She is the author of “Pacific Northwest Cheese: A History,” a 2013 publication in which Parr researched almost two centuries of dairy production in Washington and Oregon.
Clearly, there were no cheesemakers among the native inhabitants, Parr said, so it had to start when Europeans arrived. From there, it was a pretty easy process. The first arrivals to take up farming were employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
“Fort Vancouver had cattle very early on: the inventory records show that they had 48 cattle as early as 1826,” Parr said in an email message.
“The earliest record I could find of a ‘milk house’ in Hudson’s Bay Company inventory records for Fort Vancouver was in 1832. So they were at least milking cows, but it’s not clear exactly when they started making cheese.
“We do know that they were making cheese by 1836, because Narcissa Whitman observed the operation when she visited Fort Vancouver” with members of her missionary party.
From the inventory records, it appears that they expanded the dairy operation to Sauvie Island and the surrounding area around 1838, she said. At the peak of dairy operations in the early 1840s, the Hudson’s Bay Company had four dairies running on Sauvie Island, while maintaining the operation at the Fort Vancouver site.
So what type of cheese did they make?
“It’s important to remember that English cheesemaking customs of that time were informal and regional, with recipes handed down from cheesemaker (always women during that time) to cheesemaker,” Parr wrote. “So it’s hard to pin down a specific style that we’d recognize today.
“That being said, at least some of the dairying personnel were brought from the southern part of England (from the vast manors of some of the company shareholders), so in my book I extrapolated that Hudson’s Bay Company cheeses probably resembled the Gloucester or cheddar cheeses we’d find available today.”
Did You Know?
•After Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and their missionary group arrived at Fort Vancouver in September 1836, she wrote enthusiastically about the food served by their Hudson’s Bay Company hosts: “There is such a variety I know not where to begin.” Well, she began with breakfast, and then worked her way through the extensive dinner menu and “last of all, cheese, bread or biscuit & butter.”
