Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 38, number 4, summer, 1955

              .„!5!»
..•?«?«'
,.,.||K«»i
ulp'
Pauly Cheese Company, Green Bay. Wisconsin: Proc¬ essing   and   Packaging   Plant   and   General   Offices
Nicholas Pauly was a builder of excel¬ lent wagons, but the cheese industry beckoned. With the belief that quality would win, he and his wife and their successors are credited with the produc¬ tion of more than a billion pounds of premium cheese in \^ isconsin. Another proud story of pioneer ingenuity.
The Pauly Cheese Company
by Harold T. /. Shannon
In the autumn of 1953 the Pauly Cheese Company was seventy-five years old. It is possibly the first Wisconsin cheese company to attain to a Diamond Jubilee. It is certainly the only Wisconsin cheese company which has been operated for so long a time by the founder's family. In seventy-five years the Pauly family's one-room, one-vat cheese fac¬ tory has grown to be one of the three or four largest cheese companies in the world. It is a big factor in natural cheese production since its business is about equally divided between processed cheese and natural cheeses. Other giants in the cheese business process a much greater percentage of their volume.
Wifliam H. Pauly manages the company, which now centers afl of its activities in Green Bay. The general offices and the main process¬ ing and packaging operations are here. Pauly is one of seven sons of the founder, afl of whom followed in the cheese-making business. The Green Bay man's immediate predecessor as president was his brother Felix, who held the office from the time of incorporation until he retired two years ago in California.
Four third-generation Paulys are also fol¬ lowing their grandparents and parents in the cheese industry and the Pauly Company. Ralph and Frank, sons of the late Frank Pauly, Jr., headquarter at Green Bay. The former, an expert of twenty years in bulk cheese   assembling,   supervises   the   big   com¬
pany warehouse there. The second Frank Pauly is engaged in executive and legal work. Theodore and Donald are sons of Felix Pauly, the former supervising the company's cheese factories and the latter, four years out of college, is launching his career in experience in afl of the departments.
Nicholas Pauly, the father, was the founder of the huge enterprise. It was the boys' mother, Lucy Pauly, however, who made the first cheese in the Paulv cheese factory in 1878.1
Nicholas Pauly was a very young man when he came to Wisconsin from Luxembourg in 1874 upon the advice and at the insistence of a youth of his same age, who had arrived some few years before. Pauly had mastered the car¬ riage maker's trade in the old country. His friend was a good blacksmith. They did not become partners, but they became closely as¬ sociated at Knellsville, one and one-half miles north of Port Washington, in the manufacture of surreys, cutters, and farm wagons. They had no models. Each vehicle was custom- made. They were doing every bit as well as the friend had written to Pauly that he pre-
^Though Mrs. Pauly was producing cheese in the Pauly factory, it is of interest that "a Mrs. Pickett of Jefferson County, made up the milk from several farms in her farm kitchen in 1841, thus initiating co¬ operative cheesemaking." Charles Hill, "John V. Rob- bins, Pioneer Agriculturist," Wisconsin Magazine of History, 34:232 (Summer, 1951).
234