A good chunk of Goleta’s products from its agrarian past can be recited by most any bright third-grader: lemons, walnuts, pampas plumes, lima beans, olives. But one obvious industry has more or less disappeared into the June Gloom of the past: the creamery.

This is, in fact, the 100th anniversary of the demise of Goleta’s last great creamery. In 1907, Florentine “Frank” Kellogg grudgingly sold his operation to the widely disliked John Finley More for $60,000. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

According to Walker Tompkins in “Goleta: The Good Land,” Kellogg’s dairy farm and creamery played a prominent role in the valley between 1889 and 1907.

Set on Hollister Avenue just east of Ward Drive, the dairy’s signature landmark was a tall smokestack over the boiler room that could be seen for miles. Other buildings included a large creamery, two milking barns and corrals for the 75 dairy cows.

The creamery’s big churn was first powered by an unfortunate horse plodding on an inclined treadmill. It was replaced by steam engine.

Horace Sexton, who lived across Hollister from the dairy, told Tompkins that Goleta Valley farmers would show up at the creamery every day in their wagons to drop off their full 5-gallon milk cans for steam-sterilized empties.

Kellogg delivered cream, milk and butter to Santa Barbara daily, Tompkins said. Once Kellogg got a steam-driven centrifugal cream separator he could process the milk and cream from every farm in the valley.

He also had regular contact with another group: the homeless.

Goleta, Tompkins wrote, “suffered from infestation” by hobos who had to walk through the valley because of its infamous gap in railroad tracks.

“The unwashed gentry,” he wrote, “used to pester Goleta housewives for free handouts, until the ladies learned to refer the ‘Weary Willies’ to Frank Kellogg’s Creamery, where any man could get a meal — if he chopped firewood for the boiler house.”

The creamery came to an inglorious end at the hand of “King John” More, a man known for his greed and ill temper.

The youngest brother of T. Wallace More, the land baron of More Mesa who was murdered by squatters on his Sespe Ranch, John More “quickly made it clear he resented Kellogg farming a sixty-acre parcel inside the feudal domain of his martyred brother’s ranch,” Tompkins wrote.

T. Wallace More had sold Kellogg the farm for $9,000 just two weeks before his murder in 1877, and it drove King John nuts. He constantly bugged Kellogg to sell the farm, but the dairyman always refused — until April 1907.

In an effort to get rid of More, Kellogg jokingly told him, “If you want it for $1,000 an acre, the ranch is yours,” Tompkins wrote.

It was meant as a joke because farms in the area were going for $300 an acre.

But sure enough, More arrived the next day, Tompkins said, “with a bank draft for $60,000 and a deed for Kellogg to sign. Kellogg, being a man of his word, had no choice but to sell the farm he had worked for thirty years, and had no real desire to give up.”

More, sweetheart that he was, leveled every building on the farm as soon as the sale was recorded.

Photo courtesy Goleta Valley Historical Society

Caption: Frank Kellogg and family pose for a photo in from of their house. Kellogg ran the Goleta Valley’s biggest dairy and creamery from 1889 to 1907.