In this ongoing series, we feature a piece from our Museum Director, Billie DeLancey, originally published in The Johnstown Breeze on February 27, 2025. Enjoy this look back, and keep an eye on the paper for the newest stories shaping our community.
Thomas Mallonee, his wife Cynthia, and their children moved to Johnstown from Longmont after he was hired in 1917 to manage the Longmont Farmers Milling and Elevator Company in Johnstown.
A few years later, the Mallonees bought a farm north of the J.W. Purvis store at Elwell from George Pancake and soon established a Guernsey dairy herd. There, the Mallonees started the first retail dairy in Johnstown. It was named the Home Supply Dairy after the farmer’s irrigation ditch that ran through Elwell.
J.W. Purvis also raised Guernsey cattle on his farm at Elwell. His oldest son Vernon, who graduated from Johnstown High School in 1920 in a class of five, later wrote:
“I never rode the school bus to school… I had a horse and a spring wagon and I had to haul the milk from my father’s Guernsey cows to the Condensery every morning, then take the horse to a barn on the school grounds and leave her there until school was out then go down to the depot and flour mill and get freight and flour and haul (it) back to my father’s store at Elwell.”
The dairy industry in the early 1920s was in full swing a decade after the Colorado Condensed Milk Company’s plants were secured in Fort Lupton and Johnstown. It was noted in the Rocky Mountain News on New Year’s Eve 1922 that, from Fort Lupton to Johnstown it’s called the “Milky Way.” This nickname brought on by the number of dairies in Johnstown and Milliken and other towns having become surrounded by purebred Holsteins and Guernseys, it read.
Earlier in 1922, Vernon Purvis married Velta Walker from Longmont. They established their own dairy herd and ran a retail milk route for 16 years in Johnstown, Milliken, and Berthoud. They raised their two daughters and lived in the same house at Elwell for 48 years.
The Mallonees sold the Home Supply Dairy in 1929 to W.E. Elliott and son, and the new owners changed its name to the Johnstown Dairy. Later, the Mallonees’ farm was sold to the Purvis family.
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Sources: A Tribute to Johnstown, Rebecca S, Healy, 1977; Vernon Purvis written history, 1982; various historic newspaper stories.