Granville Then & Now – April 14, 2022

Parker’s Dairy ends 120 years of farming

Parker's Dairy in 1955 (Photo courtesy Parker’s Dairy Facebook page)

By Erik Pekar, Town Historian

Spring has brought rain, but so far not enough sunny days. One result of this is that dirt roads have become muddy and full of ruts. This phenomenon has happened more with the dirt roads in Vermont than in New York, including ones in the Granville area such as Bullfrog Hollow Road. On the other hand, dirt roads on the New York side, like Conety Road in Granville, have no such ruts.

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It is the end of an era in South Granville. Parker’s Dairy was shuttered early this year, with everything auctioned off separately on Feb. 13. They had been a dairy farm operation since at least the 1930s, and until 1982 directly delivered milk to houses in glass milk bottles. Afterwards, they sent out the produced milk to be sold by others, including Stewart’s. The closure and auction of the farm brought to an end more than 80 years of the dairy operation. However, the Parkers had farmed in the South Granville area since long before the dairy entered operation. As a result, Parker’s Dairy was, by way of succeeding the prior operation, one of the oldest continuously operated businesses and business locations in the town of Granville, with well over 120 years in business as a farming concern. Thank you to the Parkers and their cows for making much of the area’s milk for so many years.

Middle Granville also saw the close of a chapter of its history earlier this year, with the passing of Tony Diplock, the last of the farming Diplock family that owned the farmland to the west of the Mary J. Tanner School, as well as the hill to the south, mentioned last month in this column. Thankfully for residents of “Middle,” owner Peter Tatko, who had been a co-owner of the property in recent years, has no plans at present to develop the farmland into residential or commercial lots; it will remain leased farmland.

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The Granville Central School District recently decided to continue double bus runs rather than return to single bus runs. This means the bus drivers will pick up high school students on one run, and then go over their routes again about an hour or two later to pick up the elementary school students. The single bus run had all students on the run picked up in one run.

Granville had switched to a single bus run for the 2014-15 school year. The change was done due to projected savings in bus operation, as there would have been fewer overall runs for the buses with single runs than double runs. However, the single runs introduced other problems, including elementary students having to wake up much earlier than prior, to catch a bus as early as 6 a.m., rather than after 8 a.m., as is the case on the second run. Another serious problem was the mixing of elementary and high school students, particularly when some of the latter could get rude or foul-mouthed.

The decision by the Granville school board to continue with double bus runs is to be commended. Elementary students will have more time to sleep before waking up for their morning, and each group will be on the bus at their own times rather than altogether.