233 W Division St

Summary

Winnebago Cheese Company
233 W. Division Street, Fond du Lac, Fond du Lac County
Dates of Construction: 1914; 1920; 1925; 1930s; 1955

The Winnebago Cheese Company building at 233 W. Division Street in Fond du Lac is a former wholesale cheese distribution facility built in 1914 and enlarged in several phases between 1920 and 1955 as the company expanded its operations. From its establishment in 1906 until 1957, when the company relocated to Sheboygan County, Winnebago Cheese Company was a leader in Fond du Lac’s cheese industry, which played a major role in the city’s economy for much of the twentieth century.

The commercial production of cheese in Wisconsin, the largest cheese-producing state in the nation, originated in the late 1830s and early 1840s with small dairy-farm operations in Jefferson County. Cheese had a longer natural shelf life than milk or butter, which made it more viable to produce in commercial quantities at a time when cold storage and swift transportation were unavailable. The cheesemaking industry in Fond du Lac County was among the earliest in the state, beginning in 1844 in Springvale at the dairy farm of Chester Hazen. Between the 1860s and 1890s, the state’s dairy industry industrialized, as demand for its cheeses grew, farmers became better educated about quality control and proper storage, and the railroad system made it possible to ship cheese to out-of-state markets such as Chicago and throughout the South. By the 1920s, Fond du Lac County’s 74 cheese factories were producing more than eleven million pounds of cheese, most of which was purchased, stored, and sold by the city’s many wholesale distributors.

Winnebago Cheese Company was founded in Fond du Lac in 1906 by Franz Otto “Frank” Schujahn (1872-1932) and partners as “wholesale distributors of Wisconsin’s finest cheeses.” The company purchased large quantities of raw cheeses from local manufacturers that arrived at its facility in massive wheels. In the company’s workrooms and paraffining room, the cheeses were cut down into smaller, retail-ready quantities, then packaged in the company’s branded boxes and stored in cold-storage vaults until ready to ship. When the company relocated in 1957, the building housed other cheese-related businesses until c. 2012. Today, the Winnebago Cheese Company building is one of the few properties in Fond du Lac that survive to tell the history of the city’s cheesemaking industry.

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