The city of El Monte sits in between the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel rivers. It's a little oasis in the San Gabriel Valley. The name El Monte means the meadow or marsh or the wooded area. The perfect place perhaps to raise some cattle.
In 1904, Arden Farms was founded in El Monte, California. It was the first certified milk dairy in California. It was a state of the art facility for bottling milk.
Milk is California's largest agricultural commodity, in a state where agriculture is the number one industry. The history of milk legislation tends to be driven by fake milk products. In 1878 it was made illegal to sell oleomargarine (now just known as margarine) under the name of butter. In 1895 the California State Dairy Bureau was founded to prevent the sale of fraudulent butter and cheese.
In 1905 the Sanity Dairy Law was passed, prohibiting the sale of milk produced by unhealthy animals or under unsanitary conditions. Arden Farms was one year ahead of the curb.
Arden became a household name up and down the Pacific Coast in 1930 when they merged with California Dairies Inc. which was created by Western Dairy Products of Seattle to operate properties in California. Western Dairy Products ran ice cream outlets in the pacific northwest.
When I first talked about agriculture on this blog, I mentioned that orange juice was heavily advertised to allow orange growers to have use for any surplus produced. The same argument can be made for luxury dairy products like ice cream. If you can increase the number of dairy products, you grow the dairy business into the huge industry that it is today.
Photo credit LAPL
I do love when a photograph can bring it all together. The building in the background is the Warner Downtown theater on 7th and Hill. The movie is Roman Holiday, the 1953 film that launched Audrey Hepburn's career. Paramount released The War of the Worlds just before Roman Holiday, perhaps that's why Roman Holiday was playing at the Warner.
Remember (in case you didn't click the link) the Warner Downtown Theatre was originally a Pantages Theatre was designed by architect B. Marcus Priteca in a Greek Revival style in 1919, opening in 1920.
Anyhow, the horse drawn wagon is being used to advertise Arden's newest ice cream flavor: Texas Pecan. I'm sure it was a prop from some western or another, and certainly there must have been a place to get some Arden ice cream nearby.
Photo credit LAPL
Hey look! It's Cliftons! That's actor Lock Martin standing out in the crowd underneat the Clifton's sign, most famous for playing the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still. They drove all around downtown, spreading the good word of this new ice cream flavor. Martin even came in and said howdy to the girls in the Arden ice cream plant.
Photo credit LAPL
Of course, Arden wasn't without competition. Carnation was also a major west coast dairy operation. Balian ice cream company actually sued Arden in 1955 for lowering Arden ice cream prices purposefully in just Los Angeles trying to drive out the smaller creameries in the city.
We learn a little bit more about Arden in this court case. It was one of the largest dairy firms in the west in 1955. It owns one of the largest ice cream plants in the United States, which you see in the photo above.
