Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I just met one of my new neighbors. Nice guy, living down the street from me. We got to chatting at the bus stop, and you know how it is when you meet somebody new. You’re trying to have a nice talk, and not say anything awkward. Above all, you don’t want to say something to give them the impression that you’re weird.

“You know, your place used to be a dairy,” I commented.

Well. I tried.

Look, I study local history. I write about it. And unless you’re really, really into DC comics, local history is pretty much my only topic of conversation. Weird or not, it’s all I got.

Fortunately, he seemed a little interested in that. So I told him about it a little—Not enough to seem excessively weird—And it led to my writing about the Fairview Dairy.

The Fairview Dairy was along South Fairview Street, very near the corner of Peach Street. It’s a residential home now, giving me the opportunity to impress my neighbors with my weird knowledge, but around a hundred years ago, it was a local dairy.

It was operated by Raymond King McCloskey. McCloskey was born in Mackeyville on May 1, 1883, the son of Henry and Catherine McCloskey. Raymond had two sisters and a couple of half-siblings; Catherine was his father’s second wife of three, and he had children with each one of them. Raymond was basically right in the middle.

He grew up and married Emma Fox, and the two of them made the decision to move to Lock Haven and begin dairy farming. At the time, the Hill Section of Lock Haven was somewhat unsettled, so while it seems odd today to have a dairy farm in the middle of a residential neighborhood, it didn’t look so weird then. He founded the dairy about 1910, and lived on the property, in the same house.

His father built the house. Henry McCloskey was a prominent architect in Clinton County, and he designed and built the place for his son. He was also responsible for building the E.H. Young House up the street, which I wrote about a while back. The two buildings have a similar look to them, particularly the fanlight transoms—It’s a sort of curved upper window. (If you’re not really into architecture, don’t worry about it.) The Young House was built for a cigar-manufacturing family, and is the last remaining house owned by one of those in Lock Haven. (Henry McCloskey died in 1926, and was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery.)

Similar to his father’s success in architecture, MCCloskey was reasonably successful in the dairy business. As the neighborhood grew up around him, he wound up selling more and more products locally, right along the street. The 1925 Sanborn Map shows the property, the house with a storage area out back, and lists it as the “Fairview Dairy Depot,” an excessively cool name for a small local dairy.

A 1948 city directory shows McCloskey still living there and working on the property at that time, operating the dairy out of the back half of his property. The phone number was the same for both his home and his business, showing that he pretty much lived and breathed dairy products. The phone number was 3301—That’s the entire number. The late 1940s were wacky.

McCloskey retired from the dairy business in 1950, after running it for forty years. He was sixty-seven at the time of his retirement. Seventeen years later, he died at age eighty-three, on February 13, 1967.

Anyway, this was how I entertained my new neighbor as we waited for the bus. Until he brought up the Jersey Devil, and I told him all about how the Jersey Devil was sighted in the neighborhood in 1909. I think I’ve made a new friend.