By Larry Felton Johnson

Regular readers of the Cobb County Courier know that we often heavily cite the Georgia Historic Newspapers website in our history articles. 

Examples of our articles that came directly from research in that excellent database include this article about a serious train wreck in Powder Springs in 1907, an article about Smyrna’s thriving poultry industry in 1911, and a bizarre 1914 car chase in which two bandits were captured in Mableton.  

There are many others, and you can find them by browsing these search results from the Courier.

Browsing the site this morning, I ran across this, from the June 6, 1906 issue of the Atlanta Georgian.

After selling milk at retail in Atlanta for about a year, the Belmont Dairy of Smyrna, Ga., has announced that it is not satisfied with the results and, having made arrangements to ship its entire product elsewhere, the management discontinued its extensive business in Atlanta on Wednesday morning.

For the convenience of customers, the Belmont farm has made arrangements whereby customers will be supplied for the present by the Pure Milk and Food Company, until they have an opportunity to make other arrangements if they desire.

In a circular letter distributed Wednesday morning, the proprietors of the Belmont farm suggested that, just at this time, it would be wise for all patrons to use milk that has been pasteurized, and thus avoid danger from typhoid.

The excerpt above is from a larger article profiling the Pure Milk and Food Company.

Since I’m fascinated with the history of Cobb County’s transition from a county of small-scale agriculture (poultry, dairy, etc.) to a bedroom suburb of Atlanta, I decided to dig into Belmont Dairy a little.

One article I found, also from the Atlanta Georgian, was about a prize-winning Jersey cow whose “sire was a famous dairy bull, owned by Belmont Farms, Smyrna, Cobb county, a son of the great bull Rockford Beau, imported by William Rocekefeller [sic], Tarrytown, N.Y., direct from the Jersey Isles.”

Even though I worked in the dairy industry as a young man, I had no idea that the pedigree of dairy cattle was so well-documented and important (at least in the early 20th century).

Georgia Historic Newspapers is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the history of Cobb County or any other part of Georgia.

If you’d like to dig further into the history of Belmont Dairy, you can see the search results I used by following this link. I limited the search to 1890 to 1930, and chose about a half dozen Cobb and Atlanta newspapers.

About Georgia Historic Newspapers

Georgia Historic Newspapers is a part of the GALILEO project and is housed at the University of Georgia. It’s an amazing resource for anyone with an interest in the history of Georgia and its regions.

According to the “About” page on its website:

The Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), a part of Georgia’s Virtual Library GALILEO and is based at the University of Georgia Libraries. Since 2007, the DLG has partnered with universities, archives, public libraries, historical societies, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to digitize historical newspapers from around the state. The archive is free and open for public use and includes over two million Georgia newspaper pages between 1763 and 2021.

Newspaper titles are regularly digitized and added to the archive. If you are interested in including a particular title, you can visit our participation page. A majority of the newspapers on this site were digitized from the microfilm produced by the Georgia Newspaper Project (GNP). For more information about the microfilm available through the GNP, please visit their website.