America’s remarkable milkman got start in Texas
BORDEN — I felt a twinge of concern earlier this year when I read that Dallas-based Borden Milk Co. had declared bankruptcy. What would I do without Borden’s Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk, the primary ingredient in the lemon icebox pie I taught myself to make from my late mother’s recipe collection?
I also read that Borden’s travail in recent years has been due in part to milk drinkers spurning Elsie the Cow’s offerings for almond, soy and other plantbased products. Fortunately, the venerable company isn’t going out of business. Bankruptcy is apparently a king’s X, so to speak, to allow for restructuring.
The man who founded the 163-year-old company was all about restructuring — restructuring and condensing. Gail Borden, Jr., never visited Gail, county seat of Borden — neither town nor county existed during his lifetime — and there’s not much left of this Colorado County community where he once lived.
And yet the tinkerer, inventor and inveterate do-gooder, a man whose efforts included battling deadly epidemics, boasts impressive Texas bona fides.
In the chaotic months leading up to the Texas Revolution, Borden, his brother Tom and a partner named Joseph Baker were publishing a newspaper in San Felipe de Austin called the Telegraph and Texas Register. The 34-year-old also was the colony’s surveyor. When Stephen F. Austin was elected commander of the “Army of the People” after the Battle of Gonzales, he put Borden in charge of the colony. Borden also prepared the first topographical map of Texas and was one of three surveyors who laid out the site for a new town on Buffalo Bayou called Houston.
It was quite a load of responsibility for a young man whose formal education probably totaled less than a couple of years. Born in Norwich, N.Y., in 1801, he grew up in New London, Ind., where he was captain of the local militia at age 20. Arriving in Galveston in 1829, he farmed in Fort Bend County before moving
to San Felipe.
Amid all his duties and responsibilities, it was the publishing venture that was most crucial. “Austin believed that the business of governing required communication, and the printing press was the technology of the day,” Bryan McAuley, site manager at the San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site, reminded me recently. “He (Borden) became the mouthpiece of the Texas Republic.”
William Barret Travis’s immortal “Victory or Death” letter from the Alamo was published in the Telegraph and Texas Register, as was the fledging Republic’s Declaration of Independence.
When word reached San Felipe on March 12 that the defenders of the Alamo had perished, Borden joined other residents of the town in a desperate flight eastward. He hauled his printing press across the mud-bound prairie with him, but when Santa Anna found it at Harrisburg, he had his men heave it into Buffalo Bayou. The Telegraph and Texas Register revived in Houston, but Borden by then had turned his restless, inventive mind to other matters.
While living in Galveston in 1844, his 32-year-old wife and 4-year-old son succumbed to yellow fever. Heartbroken, Borden resolved to find a solution to the epidemic that killed hundreds whenever it struck New Orleans or Galveston or other southern cities.
Although he didn’t make the mosquito connection — that would come with Walter Reed 60 years later — Borden did observe that yellow fever usually stole over a community during the summer and then retreated with the onset of cooler weather. He proposed a giant refrigerator, with ether as a cooling agent. The refrigerator would be large enough to accommodate an afflicted person or persons for at least a week in “a temporary winter.”
Borden’s idea never got off the drawing board, but his next invention did. Sort of. He called it a “terraqueous machine,” something of a combination wagon and sailboat designed to travel on land and sea. According to his biographer, the late Joe B. Frantz, Borden considered the machine
“the invention of the century.”
He built one, although the top-heavy contraption with wheels that became paddles succeeded mainly in flipping over when it breasted the waves, dumping Borden’s trusting passengers into the shallow waters of Galveston Bay. He also invented a “locomotive bath house,” so Galveston women could change into bathing attire in private before being transported to the water.
A contemporary quoted in the Frantz biography described Borden as a tall man with a high forehead and unusually long nose. Shabbily dressed, he walked around Galveston with his head down, unaware of his surroundings, no doubt working through solutions to problems that captured his attention.
One of his preoccupations was inspired by a frontier ordeal that shocked the nation. In McAuley’s words, “He was horrified by the Donner Party tragedy and set about trying to create a longlasting food stuff, so if you get marooned in a mountain pass, you’re not having to eat each other.”
His solution was a concoction made of dehydrated meat mixed with flour, shaped into biscuits and then baked. Even though contemporary reviewers claimed they tasted like melted glue mixed with molasses, ‘49ers relied on Borden’s meat biscuits on their arduous trek to California, as did members of an Arctic expedition.
The Army could have made Borden a wealthy man by making his biscuits a part of every soldier’s field ration. Instead, the little bricks of meat were deemed “not only unpalatable, but failed to appease the craving of hunger—producing head ache, nausea, and great muscular depression.” By 1852, Borden was bankrupt.
About that time, Borden was sailing home from England when the cows in the hold of the ship got so seasick they couldn’t be milked. Mothers on board with infants were desperate, but to Borden the crying babies were an inspiration. He resolved to condense milk as he had condensed meat. In 1856, he was awarded a patent for “producing concentrated milk in vacuo.”
This time the Army came through for him. With the onset of the Civil War, the federal government selected condensed milk as a field ration. When soldiers returned home, they raved about milk that never soured. Borden’s condensed milk became so popular that he found it impossible to meet demand.
His discovery made him rich and famous, but he continued to tinker and invent. He came up with processes for condensing fruit juices, coffee, tea and cocoa, as well as making beef extract. After the war, he established a meat-packing plant in this oncethriving little town ( just off I-10, between present-day Columbus and Weimar). He also established a freedman’s school in Borden and supplemented the incomes of poorly paid teachers and preachers.
Borden died in Borden on Jan. 11, 1874; his body was shipped by private railway car to New York to be buried in Woodlawn Cemetery. He was 72.
In Frantz’s Gail Borden: Dairyman to a Nation, published way back in 1951, Borden comes across as something of an early day Thomas Edison — eccentric, driven and dedicated to making things better for his fellow man. The key to his success was the condensing process, as this Borden quote underscores: “The world is changing in the direction of condensing . . . . Even lovers write no poetry, nor any other stuff and nonsense. They condense all they have to say into a kiss.”
Borden was in late middle age when his triumph made him what you might call the nation’s incredible shrinking man. It took him a while, but he was not one to quit, as his epitaph proclaims: “I tried and failed. I tried again and again and succeeded.”