7 Acre Dairy Company


Paoli's Butter Box. 1/22/23 dwm

I received an email invitation to the local historical society's meeting at Seven Acre Dairy Company.

It's inside the old Paoli Cheese Factory started in 1888 by local dairy farmers who needed a place to turn their milk into cheese.

It became a creamery seven years later which added butter to the product line and the butter made the dairy famous at a time people started buying butter instead of churning it.

The society's featured speaker Nic Mink, a former history professor, bought the old factory with his wife with an idea of creating a viable business that fits the artisanal village of Paoli.

Mink told our group that when they were deciding whether or not to buy he talked to a neighboring farmer who shared some of the factory's history. It represents the Golden Era of America's Dairyland when there were 60,000 dairy farms in the state and more than 1,000 dairies where milk was made into a variety of products.

Owner Nic Mink tells their story.

Currently there are just over 6,000 dairy farms in Wisconsin. A few remain in the southern part of the state and several of the survivors sent milk to Paoli and plan to deliver again to Seven Acre.

After the talk, I walked the hall through what used to be the fluid milk division in the 1950s and is now home to eight distinct hotel rooms.

Near the front of the building, where an addition was built to expand butter production in 1948, they are making butter again. Mink joked the factory that used to be the largest butter factory in the state is the smallest.

In the original cheese and butter plant and rooms that held mechanical operations you can order a Pabst poured at the bar to go with the pizza that was part of Mink's original dream for their small business.

During restoration history was discovered.

A timeline is on the wall of the former garage which now serves as a conference room. One picture shows farmers in the with a prized calf, recalling a time when 100 farms within ten miles delivered milk to the Paoli Creamery.

A kitchen serving a modern version of farmstead cooking is opening next month. For breakfast and lunch, the Dairy Cafe serves breakfast fare and sandwiches alongside their own soft-serve ice cream.

I expect Seven Acre will be busy with visitors from near and far, celebrating Wisconsin's dairy heritage and future in a building where butter was made in the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries.