Jefferson County Online A part of the IAGenWeb and USGenWeb Projects Who's Who in Jefferson County, 1931 Grant Enlow

"The Fairfield Daily Ledger"
Tuesday, August 18, 1931
Front Page

Who's Who In Jefferson County
By Herbert F. McDougal

GRANT ENLOW

Fairfield owes its bottled milk to Grant Enlow. Since he introduced the bottled product in this city, he has distributed more than three-quarters of a million quarts of it--and three-quarters of a million quart bottles, placed end to end, would reach a long ways.

When he went into the quality milk business, 24 years ago, down on a farm near Birmingham, and established the beginnings of his herd, the neighbors gathered about the two pure-bred Guernseys he had just purchased for the foundations of his herd--April 1907--and facetiously asked "if he wasn't afraid the wolves would get into his sheep?" But undeterred, he went ahead with his plans. He has spent the last 24 years building up a herd of pure-bred Guernsey cattle, for 21 years established upon the farm which he bought of Mr. and Mrs. Harry E. Smith. He now owns one of the best pure-bred herds in Iowa. Mr. Enlow has always been active in co-operating with any local enterprise to better the handling of dairy products and advance the interests in dairy supplies. He has studied the Old Reliable Hoard's Dairyman through and through.

All along through the years, he would occasionally take a short course at Ames on feeding and better production, a course in Kansas City on the care of animals as to health conditions affecting the milk. He was one of the first to cooperate with the health authorities on tubercular testing, also weighing milk, feeding to produce milk for infants and the sick. He was perhaps responsible for saving the lives of many little ones through producing a sanitary milk for infant feeding. The cooling and handling of milk is an imporant study within itself, to which he has given much attention. He has attended the dairy shows at Chicago and Waterloo almost every year, keeping in touch with anything new that would better his knowledge of the business in which he is so much nterested (sic). He is one of the best versed men in Jefferson county on pedigreed stock.

His father was a pioneer and a wagonmaker by trade, in the day when a bucket of axle-grease hung by the side of the wagon. The elder Enlow located on government land near Birmingham, and a daughter, Miss Florence Enlow, still lives on the old home place. For a long time he carried the mail horseback from Des Moines to Keosauqua, traveling over an old Indian trail that crossed Cedar creek where the bridge is now located, five miles south of Fairfield.

Grant Enlow married Miss Maude Bates, October 5, 1902. They have two children, both of whom went through the public and high schools here and were graduated from Parsons college. The daughter, Mrs. Harvey Stephenson, lives in Quincy, Ill., and the son Cloyce is the principal and supervisor of music in the Sheldahl schools, a position he has held for three years.