Dairies were founded from the Bear River Ridge to the south side of the Eel River starting in the late 1860s. Filled kegs of butter were transported along the beach river by four-horse teams from the Mattole to Centerville or Port Kenyon and the teams returned supplies from Ferndale. The eighty-one dairies from the southern area faded as the land along the Eel River Valley was settled for dairying, first by the Danes and later by other settlers. In the 1880s multiple cooperative creameries in the Eel River valley began to process milk into butter; by 1904 the Central Creamery on Main Street Ferndale had combined the smaller operations into a more modern production facility. The use of paper wrapping on butter to reduce air oxidizing the product was pioneered here at the suggestion of Chester E. Gray (1881–1944) from the U.S. Department of Agriculture who studied the problem of unrefrigerated fine butter turning white within hours of production. Gray patented a new spray-drying process (U.S. Patent #858,868 - 1907 and #1,157,935 - 1915) and went into business with Central Creamery owner Aage Jensen in a new dry-milk manufacturing process to utilize non-fat milk solids which had formerly been waste of the process. Their new plant processed 75,000 pounds of milk a day, shipping to San Francisco and filling contracts for the U.S. Navy. The first motorized milk truck was used here. In 1916 Grey and Jensen moved to San Francisco and changed the company name to Golden State Creamery. Local Ferndale resident Andrew Genzoli began recording the history of the Ferndale dairies during this time, culminating in scrapbooks of newspaper clippings from 1910-1954, which are on file for viewing at Humboldt State University Special Collections.