My parents always had milk delivered to their front porch by Mathis Dairy. They had a metal box with the words “Mathis Dairy” which was a permanent fixture on our porch. If you grew up in Atlanta, you may have gone on a school field trip to R. L. Mathis Dairy on Rainbow Drive in Decatur and milked their famous cow Rosebed. My school went on that field trip.
In 2007, I wrote about the Mathis Dairy and heard from Preston Born who was delivering milk to homes at that time. He had begun around 1978 and recalled the various dairies, such as Puritan Dairy which was later bought out by Mathis Dairy. Mathis Dairy then became part of Kinnett, Atlanta Dairies, and Parmalat.
There were several dairies in north DeKalb County in the 1930s and 1940s, including Chamblee, Dunwoody, and Brookhaven, but the C. S. Webb Dairy began when Cliff and Clara Webb came to Sandy Springs in 1924. The dairy was located where Aberdeen Forest subdivision is now located, at the intersection of Johnson Ferry Road and Glenridge Drive.
Lois Coogle, in her book “More Sandy Springs Past Tense,” tells how the neighborhood is named after the Aberdeen Angus cattle the Webb’s once owned on the property. They made deliveries to Atlanta residents, because “most everyone in Sandy Springs had a cow” at the time.
After the 2007 article, Montez Webb Shackleford contacted me and shared more about the dairy and her family. She was one of the twelve children of Cliff and Clara Webb. There were eight girls and four boys.
Arthur Mabry, local builder in Sandy Springs, built the dairy barn, milk house, sleeping barn, and engine and boiler room. Very modern for the time, the buildings had cement floors and the barn doors were wide enough for the milk trucks to park inside at night. There were fifteen stalls on either side of the barn with iron bars between each stall, a feeding trough in each stall.
All the work on the dairy was done by the family with younger children feeding the cows and older ones milking cows, straining, bottling and icing down milk for delivery. Each child had their own stool and bucket and carried the full bucket to the milk house when they finished.
At the milk house, the milk was strained in large sterilized cans, bottled in glass bottles, closed off with a stopper, and stored in a large ice box. The ice was hauled from the Buckhead Ice House in one hundred pound blocks..
Every morning, the milk was iced down and put on trucks for delivery to Atlanta. Products sold included whole milk, buttermilk, chocolate milk, and cream. Milk was not pasteurized at this time. The family wrote out the bills for customers by hand and collected at the end of each month.
Mrs. Shackleford attended Hammond Grammar School, which was located where Mount Vernon Towers is today, at Mount Vernon Road and Johnson Ferry Road. She went to North Fulton High School on Delmont Drive.
The Webb family attended Sandy Springs Methodist Church. Between church and milking time on Sunday afternoons, friends and neighbors would come by the farm for a freezer of ice cream or a watermelon cutting.
Mrs. Shackleford passed away June 30, 2020. I’m glad I had the chance to interview her and greatly appreciate her sharing her memories of the C. S. Webb Dairy.
Other sources cited: “More of Sandy Springs Past Tense” by Lois Coogle.