The Dairy Blog

The founder of Mayfield Dairy Farms is my grandfather and I want to share with you a little bit about him in my next couple of blogs. I hope you enjoy…

Even though my Great Grandfather (1853-1941) may have sold milk and butter as early as the 1880’s, it is my Grandfather, T. B. Mayfield, Jr. (1888-1937), who we consider the founder of Mayfield Dairy Farms.  I never knew my Grandfather, as he died young, before age fifty, which would be twelve years before I was born.  I’ll try to relate what I do know of him, from memory of things my Grandmother said, and from some of my Father’s remembrances and writings.  There are very few pictures of my Grandfather, and those we have shown him always wearing a hat.

T. B. Mayfield, Jr. (Brient) stood 5’10 ½”, medium build with grey eyes and dark brown hair.  I know from my Father’s writings that “he studied mechanical and electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee.  He understood how simple machines worked and he could fix almost anything.  He was a great teacher who taught several ordinary workers to be good mechanics.  He loved Jersey cows and, while showing Jersey cows at the St. Louis Fair around 1910, he ate his first ice cream cone and decided he wanted to be in the ice cream business.  He had a great vision of the future, which included a 4-lane highway from Knoxville to Chattanooga and how Athens (down in the country where the cows are) was the right location to serve these growing markets.”

During the period from 1910 to 1923, my Grandfather was a partner with his father and together they farmed the 824-acre family dairy farm.  He married Goldie Denton Mayfield (1898-1993) in 1918 and they had four children – two boys and two girls.  In 1913, he built a spring house that used a constant flow of cold spring water pumped by a hydraulic ram.  (This was before electricity was available.)  At age 35, in 1923, he purchased an existing ice cream business that was located in the Athens Ice Plant.