Jones Dairy Farm: The Sausage That Saved the Farm

In eighteen eighty-nine, Milo Jones had been crippled for years by rheumatoid arthritis. He could no longer work the six hundred acres his family had farmed along the Rock River since the eighteen thirties. Facing ruin, he retreated to the cheese room of the farmhouse and started making sausage from his mother's Vermont recipe.

The product sold. He built a business. In the nineteen twenties, Jones Dairy Farm became the first meat-packing company in the country to quick-freeze breakfast sausage, opening the door to exports that began in nineteen thirty-eight.

Today the plant still operates in Fort Atkinson, employing nearly five hundred people. A Vermont recipe, a bad back, and a cheese room built one of Wisconsin's oldest food companies.