08/19/2025
The Nantahala Creamery
by John deVille, Executive Director, Macon County Historical Museum (Previously published in The Franklin Press)
“It was the best chocolate milk ever” — a common judgment in 2025 of the one of Nantahala Creamery’s most prized products by Macon County citizens for over four decades in the 20th century.
The mid 1920s saw a convergence of three variables that enabled the rise of the Franklin-based Nantahala Creamery. First, Macon County had ample, high-quality farmland. Consider this staggering statistic — in 1880 we had 1,182 farms in Macon County, with each farm averaging 184 acres. The magic behind the creation of the Creamery required two other key ingredients — better roads and an entrepreneurial vision.
The 1921 NC Highway Act with a $50 million bond financed the paving of 5,500 miles of North Carolina roads connecting all county seats and other smaller towns. The Act enabled the paving of NC 28 from Franklin to Hayesville in 1925 and in 1929, allowed for the creation of the Cullasaja Gorge Road/US 64 from Franklin to Highlands.
The new roads created a sweet spot — the roads were just good enough to allow milk from over 50 dairies in seven counties to be delivered to the Nantahala Creamery and subsequent shipping of homogenized (and later also pasteurized) milk and butter to a regional market but not so good as to make a regional creamery vulnerable to exceptionally large-scale operations. The final essential piece was the tenacious vision of A.B. (“Burt”) Slagle who repurposed part of the Cartoogechaye farm started by his father Charles.
The founding of the Nantahala Creamery is a bit fuzzy. The dominant narrative is that Burt Slagle took over the operation in 1927 as well as Mr. Slagle being present, but not the owner of record, at the very beginning in 1925.
A century ago, on April 28th, 1925 stockholders met with temporary directors Lawerence Ramsey, A. B. (“Burt”) Slagle, and C.W. Teague. A week later they met with a representative of the Cherry-Bassett company, a premier dairy equipment manufacturer out of Baltimore, to discuss purchases they would need to make to launch the creamery the following year.
To clear up any possible confusion on the terms, in the early 20th century, “dairy” was a reference to a milk production operation of some size while a creamery took milk in from several dairies and then converted that into homogenized, eventually pasteurized milk, as well as butter, cream, and possibly various cheeses.
In two short years, Slagle was the chief operator of the Nantahala Creamery and he had turned it into a regional agricultural powerhouse. By 1928, Nantahala was the only creamery west of Asheville, being supplied with milk from dairies from eight counties: Macon, Jackson, Swain, Clay, Cherokee, as well as Georgia counties Rabun, Habersham, and Madison.
At this point the creamery was shipping 22,000 pounds of butter a month to Asheville, constituting 98 percent of their total production. The following year Slagle would transfer his existing equipment to Hayesville, buy all new for Franklin, creating a behemoth operation producing 200,000 pounds of butter a year by 1929.
One can trace almost a “dairy movement” across the country at this point, as farmers were able to go beyond banking an entire grain harvest on one moment in the fall which could easily be an economic disaster, to multiple paychecks across the year, as their dairy cows converted hay into milk, which could be converted into more profitable and storable commodities such as butter and cheese.
The Creamery was a godsend to the region's farmers. In November 1928, the Jackson County Agricultural agent was pleased to announce that Jackson County farmers were receiving $1,162.64 a month from sales of their milk to the Nantahala Creamery. “Even this amount of cash means lots to small farmers while money is so scarce. And this income will double or treble when these farmers have had the time to grow more good cows and make good pastures, and make more preparation for feeding a winter ration that will produce lots of milk and butterfat” adding, “farmers of this section and Nantahala Creamery are producing the only butter in this state with quality enough to sell readily on the Asheville market.” After the stock market crash in October of 1929, Lee Crawford, President of the Bank of Franklin, remarked, “the Creamery here brought in more money into the county than any other thing except the sale of poultry and eggs.”
Slagle’s Nantahala Creamery was both a state and national leader in terms of the exceptional sanitary conditions of their operation. The federal government passed the 1924 Standard Milk Ordinance, written by the U.S. Public Health Service, to curb the transmission of milk borne illnesses. At the time one in four food borne illnesses came from contaminated milk. Macon County Board of Health adopted the code in 1936 and Nantahala Creamery became one of the first creameries in the state to earn the coveted “Grade A” label in 1937, meaning that the dairy cows were certified as being free from disease from physical examination and tuberculin tests as well as having exceptionally low amounts of bacteria.
At the outset with his dairy and creamery, Burt Slagle had converted the milking and processing facilities from traditional wood to modern concrete and masonry in the quest to curtail the growth and spread of bacteria. Nantahala Creamery would routinely be certified as being the most sanitary in the state. The high quality of the Creamery products were maintained with the operation being designated as the most sanitary in the state in 1951, elevating Macon County to be one of 160 counties and cities across the country to be on the US Public Health Service’s “Honor Roll.”
In addition to the roads, farmland, and vision being essential ingredients, perhaps the impact the TVA and rural electrification had was the icing on the cake. Burt Slagle’s niece Kathy Tinsley remembers the impact that the Tennessee Valley Authority and the rural electrification efforts had on her uncle’s and her father's dairy operations. With electric milking machines “15 cows could be milked in 55 minutes, which by today's standard might be slow but my point is that I think rural electrification and TVA really, really changed things for farmers.”
The TVA and rural electrification were essential for both producer and consumer and thus for the entire dairy market. As Kathy recounted, rural electrification enabled Tinsley’s father and dairyman Siler Slagle to improve his operation, “using refrigeration to lower bacteria counts, and to auger protein and corn to his cattle.” On the consumer end, without the TVA and rural electrification there would have been no refrigerators to store butter, cream or milk, thus forestalling the market enjoyed by the Nantahala Creamery and its member dairies.
There were several modifications to the operation after WWII, with Burt Slagle selling the butter and cream operation to Coble Milk Products of Lexington, NC while the Nantahala Creamery name remained and Slagle continued his dairy operation. By the 1950s, the Creamery had an auxiliary pasteurizing plant in Brevard. Slagle was also selling his prized Guernseys 600 miles away in Largo, Florida, selling “Flossie” for $675 — over $12,000 in 2025 dollars. In the 1920s, the Creamery had taken in milk from 50 dairies in Macon County alone. With consolidation, that number dropped to 25 dairies in Macon, Jackson, and Swain and another five from Rabun County.
The Creamery was more than just an economic win for farmers across eight counties, it provided several jobs in Franklin as well as a de facto “wellness check” operation carried out by its thoughtful milkmen. In 1959, as the Creamery was celebrating its 32nd anniversary, it boasted in advertisements that it employed over 40 people.
Franklin resident Bud Greene remembers working for several years for the Creamery in the 1960s, staying with the operation after Nantahala sold out to Biltmore. His almost daily route to Cullowhee included over 50 stops, with his son Bob, stowing away in the truck cab, laying down on the floor of the truck cab until the truck cleared the Creamery property since passengers weren’t allowed.
“There were a lot of notes left”, remembers the elder Greene. “Do you mind to put the clothes in the dryer?” or just lots of different things, “Let the dog out”, whatever. It was a real nice time to live”, as he recounted the kindness shown to him by Burt Slagle, and his daughter Elizabeth, who ran the retail operation, along with her husband Erwin Patton.
Greene also remembered not ever missing a day of work because of the weather.
“It didn't matter if it snowed. I’d just put chains on the truck. Never missed a day. Well, I did miss one day. New Year's Day. It came a big snow that night. And I started to work and got down there below the house and got stuck. Snow was knee deep. We worked holidays. We didn't take off much. Christmas and Thanksgiving was two days we tried to get off.”
When I asked the Greenes if they could tell any difference in taste from the Nantahala milk compared to competitors in a blind taste test, they both responded in the negative but Bob offered, “their chocolate milk was the best.” Bud extended that thought saying that the chocolate milk “made me a lot of friends… the little kids at school, every once in a while I'd slip them some chocolate milk.” The chocolate milk made one friend that eventually got the senior Greene a sweetheart deal on improving his driveway.
Franklin resident Bo Bryant recounted her then 14-year-old father Bob Gillespie delivering for the Creamery. “He didn’t have a driver’s license yet, but knew how to drive. He lived close to the creamery and walked to work at 4:30 each morning to help get the milk loaded onto delivery trucks. Then he drove one of the trucks up the mountain to Highlands to deliver each day, back to Franklin, and helped clean before going home.”
Bob Gillespie was probably delivering to the beloved Bill’s Soda Shop in Highlands, remembered by Highlands residents and visitors 55 and older. Owner Bill Holt’s daughter Betty Holt remembers her father making milkshakes from milk delivered by Nantahala.
As the 60s and 70s approached, the regional road advantage had disappeared shifting the margins as the economy of scale meant only the big operators could make a profit and the Creamery was finally sold to the Biltmore operation. The last ads for the Nantahala Creamery appear in 1967. The interconnectedness of Macon County dairy farmers, the Creamery drivers, and their customers disappeared soon after.
But the memory of delicious cold chocolate milk in a small flip-top glass bottle persists.
