Those old enough to remember the milkman at the door might also remember one of the local fixtures that supplied the milk. The Georgian Bay Creamery, established in Parry Sound in the 1930s, was a bustling source for all things milky and employed around 25 workers at the peak of business.  Former owner, Cliff Beagan, 76, says he and another local man, Jack Patterson, 85, bought the business from Herby Graham, of Huntsville Dairy, around 1969. 

Beagan says in the creamery’s early days, all the milk was supplied by local farmers.
“They had a driver who went around to all the farms and he bought the cream,” he says. “We pasteurized it and made butter.”
The homegrown operation could produce up to 500 pounds of butter every day, he says, and could go through 2,000 cases of milk over the course of a summer.
“Back in the late ‘30s, ‘40s, they would get milk locally and pasteurize it and bottle it, and deliver it door to door through horse and buggy,” he says.
Milk was also shipped into town from Alliston, Ontario, says Beagan, in shipments of 20 cans at a time.
“Come to think of it, it wasn’t even cooled,” he recalls. “It was in the baggage car.”
Beagan got his start at the creamery before the war, and says he peddled milk throughout those years.
“And it was 10 to 12 cents for a quart of milk,” he said.
Milk made its way to doorsteps in glass bottles, and once empty they were steamed sterile and refilled.
In the 50s, Beagan moved south, and started working at the General Motors plant in Windsor. While he didn’t like the dirty atmosphere at the plant, the father of five did appreciate one benefit of that business life.
“I had the privilege that most fathers don’t have,” he said. “The doctor can’t take the kids to work with him, but every one of my kids from the time they were 11 years old were in the business with me.”
He said he got to spend extra time with them, teach them about business principles and work ethic.
“Now they’re adults, but every one of my kids all worked for me over there,” he says. “And they tell me it was a great education for them, to be involved in a business at a very early age.”
Fed up with life in Windsor, Beagan moved his family back to Parry Sound. He said leaving his job, and pension, wasn’t an easy decision, but today he feels good about the choice he made.
“I was worried about losing my pension, but the way it looks today it seems like that pension’s not going to be there anyway,” he says.
 All five children came to work with him at his newly-obtained creamery, either handling production, or working at the dairy bar selling ice cream and milkshakes.
“The creamery was always noted for good milkshakes,” he says. “We got a write up in a magazine, it was an Ontario motor magazine, and she (the writer) went around and said the best cup of coffee was at someplace in Windsor, the best apple pie was at another place, and the best milkshake was at the Georgian Bay Creamery in Parry Sound.”
Beagan says after the stellar write up, published in the 1970s, they started seeing a lot more traffic.
“And holy geez, people would come in off the highway to get our milkshakes,” he adds.
After producing their own milk at the creamery for a time, Patterson and Beagan switched over to buying their milk from an out-of-town producer.
“They produced a good product that was marketable... and we got a lot of good acceptance,” Patterson says. “Under the old process you ended up with leaking containers.”
Today the creamery is no more. The building it occupied is now Orr’s Fine Meats & Deli. Beagan says the business dissolved in the late 1990s, because it could no longer compete with larger companies from out of town. So locals following the 100 mile diet - a regimen of foods collected from local producers - have a tough time finding dairy products.
Ellen Gilchrest, 85, whose father-in-law, Tony Gilchrest, operated a dairy business from about 1916 to 1925, said it was fun to see the milkman every morning.
“You’d put your money in a bottle and put it outside your door, and that would give the guy an idea... how many quarts you took,” she says. “It was a social thing, the milkman knew everybody.”
Beagan says once the business started to slow down, they tried to make up lost ground by taking over local operation of the Northland bus line, and opened a sub-post office. But it wasn’t enough.
“The post office didn’t pay, it created traffic but didn’t pay,” he says. “People started driving by car, and the revenue from the bus declined.”
Patterson says their milk business, which started out well, had become a burden and it was time to get out. The man who’d left a good job working for the Canadian Pacific Railway jokes that he wonders if leaving that position was a good move.
“In ‘69, I was the regional manager for Ontario, for that department... and I enjoyed that,” he says, chuckling under his breath. “Sitting back today I wonder why in the hell we ever got into this, we didn’t know the first thing about it.”
Beagan says the drop in their bottom line was a sign of the times. Their business plan just couldn’t stand up to big competition.
“It was something similar to say, the T. Eaton company in Toronto,” he says. “We’d say why (would they close), they were there for a hundred years. Well their business plan got eclipsed by better business plans.”
They eventually sold the business to the Parry Sound Dairy, who sold it to one of their drivers, and soon the Georgian Bay Creamery was a thing of the past.
“There used to be lots of jobs at the Parry Sound Dairy, in the delivery of wholesale milk and dairy, but now there’s none,” says Beagan.
Now big companies such as Kawartha Dairy, Neilson’s and Parmalat deliver milk to local grocers.
Beagan isn’t bitter about the creamery’s closure, but he said he does miss the friendly small-town atmosphere.
“My favourite part of the business itself was the people,” he says. “They were a great bunch of people... you meet a lot, working in the post office, the bus, it was all a wonderful experience.”
Patterson says it was exciting to be a big player in the local economy.
“It was the excitement of the scope that we had, we operated from down around MacTier, to Rosseau, and up to Britt and then out toward Sundridge,” he says, adding that since only they, and the Parry Sound Dairy, had licences to operate in the area, they often had more business then they knew what to do with. Their wood-sided trucks, which he says weren’t refrigerated or even insulated, had to rush out to make deliveries before the milk went sour. And while the milk trade was always steady, he says it was often the demand for ice cream that surprised him.
“It was unbelievable the quantities people would want,” he says. “”For instance, Camp Manitouwabing, they’d get the notion about noon that they were going to have pralines and cream ice cream for supper. So they’d phone down and say we want 10 tubs of pralines ice cream, and you’ve got to have it up here by 4:30. They were such a good customer - they bought so much stuff - that we had to do what they asked.”