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- Narrator: It's no mistake
Wisconsin is known as the ""dairy state."
Agriculture fueled Beloit's early growth,
including dairy farms like the Dougan Dairy.
Wisconsin defended its dairy industry when margarine,
a French-invented inexpensive butter replacement,
came to the United States in the late 1800s.
Seeing the potential impact
on Wisconsin's growing dairy industry,
the state legislature
enacted a ban on yellow margarine in 1895,
aiming to protect its dairy farmers
and preserve nthe quality and market dominance
of traditional dairy products.
Despite this ban,
yellow margarine became a desired contraband
within the state
and Wisconsinites traveled to state line towns like Beloit
to buy it by the case
from stores conveniently located just across the border.
- John Patrick: So, when I was just a little child,
my dad owned a corner grocery store.
It was on South Eighth Street--
you know, Eighth Street was Wisconsin,
South Eighth Street was Illinois--
and he was about a block into Illinois
was where his grocery store was located.
The State of Wisconsin made a law
that you only could bring in
10 pounds of yellow margarine
across the state line at one time.
So he said, I would stay open on Saturday and Sunday
and the cars would come at seven in the morning
and the guy would come and buy,
they'd buy 10 pounds of margarine.
And then, a half an hour later the same guy would be back.
He'd buy ten more pounds of margarine.
He said it would go on all day.
We lived next to the store,
but then we bought this brand-new house
in Beloit on Hackett Street.
In later years, he told me,
he said, "I sold enough yellow margarine in two years--
"I kept saving my margarine money--
that I paid cash for that house."
My folks built a house on bootleg butter. [chuckles]
Probably not a whole lot of people could say that!
- Narrator: In 1967,
Wisconsin repealed the ban on yellow margarine,
ending the pilgrimage to the state line
for the yellow spread.
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