Ripple Through Time: The History of Kawartha Dairy
In 1937, Jack and Ila Crowe moved back home to Bobcaygeon, purchasing Charles Johnson’s dairy business—being Jack’s brother-in-law. Jack had learned the profession while working at Oshawa Dairy (now Beatrice/Lactalis). The young couple acquired a horse, wagon, equipment and the building. At the time they went into business, there were three dairies in Bobcaygeon. The original Kawartha Dairy building was small, white and contained three rooms. Electric refrigeration was not yet common, so they had a cold storage room cooled with ice that was cut from the lake in winter. In the washup room, milk bottles were cleaned before they were filled and a cap was put on. The milk was processed in the third room, with a boiler to provide heat and a steam engine powering the equipment via a line shaft. Kawartha Dairy initially produced about 100 litres of pasteurized milk per day—pasteurization was not yet required and the other Bobcaygeon dairies did not make the transition to producing pasteurized milk once it became necessary.
Initially Jack and Ila had just one employee. Not only did they pick up milk from farmers around Bobcaygeon, they also delivered milk to their customers. In their second year of business, Jack broke his leg while training a horse, so Ila stepped up to help with all the deliveries. Many Bobcaygeon residents would fondly recall Ila delivering milk with her six children.
Before electrical refrigeration became common, ice cream was a very special treat that was typically made by hand, in small batches and immediately consumed. By the 1950s, it had become practical to keep pre-made ice cream in a “deep freeze” as freezers were then called, and Kawartha Dairy began producing ice cream. In 1960, the business acquired its first refrigerated milk truck, as horse drawn wagons passed into history. For many years, families typically consumed milk the day it was delivered in a glass bottle, but by the 1970s, milk was packaged in plastic bags that kept for two weeks. In 1980, Kawartha Dairy phased out home delivery.
As dairies were relived of the laborious job of delivering milk daily to each home, they came to serve a much larger area. By 1990, Kawartha Diary had sixteen trucks and two tractor trailers on the road and had come to serve the region. Since then, Kawartha Dairy has developed a reputation across Ontario for its high-quality ice cream and in 2025 the company opened a new store at Brittania Beach, British Columbia. It still prides itself in using the same ice cream recipe that Jack began marketing after taking a course at the Ontario Agricultural College—back in the days when the milk wagon delivered daily and no one had heard of “frozen dairy dessert.”
