Business: Southern Cheese

At Durant, Miss., a great piece of cheese lay on a massive platform last week. The cheese weighed 2,000 Ibs. and in its way was as notable as the notables who stood about it, sniffed at it, rolled a slice from its savory bulk over their tongues—Governor Dennis Murphree of Mississippi, President Lawrence Aloysius Downs of the Illinois Central, President John H. Kraft of the Kraft Cheese Co., and many another.

President Kraft had had that great cheese made. It symbolized the opening at Durant, of the first commercial cheese factory in the South. And that factory meant a market for milk; a market for milk meant that dairy industry would develop and kill the bane of a single (cotton) crop in the South,

X. A. Kramer of McComb, Miss., last week announced that next month he would have a cheese factory operating at McComb, and quickly thereafter four more—at Magnolia, Liberty, Osyka and Tylertown, Miss. Five condenseries are also to be built in the state— at Starkville, Aberdeen, Tupelo, Kosciusko and Macon.