November 9, 1801 was an important day in the history of dairy products and fictional corporate representatives. Gail Borden II was born. He was named after his father, but somewhat unusual names seemed to run in the family; his mother’s given name was Philadelphia. The family moved to Kentucky when young Gail was about 13, where his father worked as a surveyor plotting out the town of Covington.
After Gail II was born, the Borden family returned to more pedestrian names; he had two younger brothers named Tom and John. Tom went with Gail when he left home at 21 to settle in Mississippi, where Gail became the county surveyor (which he’d learned from his father) and a schoolteacher (despite having a grand total of one year of formal schooling himself).
After about seven years in Mississippi, Gail moved to Texas, which is where he really began to blossom. He became a sought-after surveyor and helped plan both Houston and Galveston, and in 1835 helped create the first topographical map of the whole state. Not that it was a state yet. In fact, it was about to become a country. It was part of Mexico at the time, and in 1835 the “Texians,” as they called themselves at the time, revolted to break away.
Borden was on the scene at the time and started the “Telegraph and Texas Register,” one of the first newspapers in the region. Borden had to dismantle his printing press and escape one of the Mexican Army’s advances in 1836, but was eventually captured anyway, and his printing equipment was all dumped in a river. Somewhere in his adventures he’d found time to design the “San Felipe flag” flown by the Texian army at the Battle of San Jacinto.
Just a few days after he was captured, the revolution was over. Texians had won, and declared Texas an independent nation. Borden went back into the newspaper business, but it didn’t last long — he went into government service as the customs agent for the Republic of Texas. He managed to raise about half of the entire government budget through charging fees on goods imported through the port of Galveston. At the same time, he became what we’d call today a real estate agent — he sold 2,500 lots in Galveston, which he’d also helped plot out in his role as surveyor.
Then around 1840 Borden changed directions and got interested in inventing. He was interested in refrigeration, particularly as a way to help cure diseases. His motivation may have been the death of his wife from yellow fever, in 1844. Although he never came up with any refrigeration systems that helped the medical field, refrigeration led him to food preservation. Since refrigeration was generally unknown at the time, he finally succeeded — sort of — with a dried product known as “meat biscuits”. Sounds appetizing, right? He was just in time for the 1849 Gold Rush in California, and sold enough to would-be prospectors that he established a meat biscuit factory in Galveston. His meat biscuits had won a gold medal at the World’s Fair in London in 1851, and he used that as publicity to try to get large contracts to sell his processed food to armies, hospitals, and ships.
He never got a single big contract. The US Army reported that “meat biscuits” were about as appetizing as you’d think, and even made some people sick. “Never mind,” said Borden, who closed his factory, filed for bankruptcy, and turned to another idea he’d been working on: a way to preserve milk. It took him another few years, but he finally got a patent on his new product: condensed milk. In 1856, the idea of a form of milk in a can that would last quite a long time was pretty revolutionary. Even better, Borden may have learned his lesson from the meat biscuits — when he introduced Eagle Brand condensed milk, it included a sweetener so nobody objected to the taste.
This venture, the Condensed Milk Company, was a big success. Borden’s new factories were in New York, where there were plenty of dairies to supply the milk, and once again he had good timing. The Civil War was just getting started, and the Union Army started buying condensed milk in bulk. Borden finally had his big government contract.
Even though his condensed milk business was located in the northeast, Borden was still well remembered in Texas. After he passed away in 1874, Borden County was named after him, even though he’d never even been to that part of Texas. The town that became the county seat was even named “Gail.” Then in 1899 the Condensed Milk Company changed its name to Borden, too, and continued to thrive. And that’s where the fictional corporate representatives come in.
In the 1920s, the culinary expert Jane Ellison started publishing “Magic Recipes” throughout the media — you could find Jane’s columns in newspapers, her articles in magazines, and you could even hear her on the radio. But she didn’t really exist; she was a figment of the Borden company’s marketing department. At least one of her recipes is still around in spirit though; her “Magic Lemon Cream Pie” is the basis of Key Lime Pie, just with a different citrus fruit.
By 1936, though, Borden had outgrown the simplicity of fictional human representatives and moved on to cartoon bovines. They introduced four cows: Mrs. Blossom, Bessie, Clara, and Elsie in a series of magazine ads. The other cows branched off to their own careers, probably promoting chicken restaurants, but Elsie loyally stuck with Borden and by 1939 was voted the “best ad campaign of the year.” She was so successful that she made the jump from cartoon cow to real heifer.
Borden had an exhibit in the 1939 New York World’s Fair showing off the “rotary milking parlor,” an automated milking system they’d invented. The “most alert cow” in the exhibit was from a Massachusetts family farm, and the company bought her on the spot. She was renamed “Elsie” (which she probably appreciated, since her former name was “You’ll Do, Lobelia”) and spent the rest of her career touring the country making appearances. She even appeared in a movie as Buttercup the Cow.
By the way, when you think about Elsie the cartoon cow it might remind you of Elmer, the cartoon bull who has that glue everybody uses. It should remind you — Elmer came from the Borden marketing team too, as a mate for Elsie. The company, it seems, hadn’t limited itself to just milk products; by the 1940s they had a chemical division that wanted to sell their new glue product. Elsie and Elmer stayed together for many years, and even had kids — Beulah and Beauregard were born — er, drawn — in 1948. Then in 1957 Larabee and Lobelia, the twins, came along.
And there you have it, a 200-year journey from a human couple named Gail and Philadelphia to a cow couple named Lobelia and Elsie. But nobody ever renamed the condensed milk; it’s still just called Eagle Brand.
