In 1897, President Charles Duncan McIver bought a plot of land to serve as the first campus farm. The original College Farm, which was also used as a dairy, was located near the current Quad. It included a barn and supplied the school with milk, pork, and produce. The Farm also served as a horticulture teaching laboratory. An additional campus barn was built near Dairy (now Josephine Boyd) Street and was part of a dairy farm that supplied milk to the campus. Additional cows and milking machinery were purchased, and for a time, the dairy produced enough milk to sell its surplus to local dairies.

In 1923, the farm moved to a 250-acre site located in Friendship Township, in western Guilford County, and was used primarily as a Dairy Farm. Holstein cows provided milk for the students and extra milk was sold to local dairies. During World War II, the farm used German Prisoners of War for labor. The College kept the farm until 1945 when the land and the cattle were sold at auction.

This glass milk jug is labeled “Half Pint of Liquid. Woman’s College of U.N.C.” It would have been filled with milk from the Friendship Township farm at some point between 1932 and 1945.

Supplemental Materials

Spartan Story about the campus dairy farm