Perkins of Portland: Perkins The Great

by Ellis Parker Butler

We owned our own cows, and built our own dairy and cheese factory, and made first-class cheese. As each cheese was just the right size to fit in a can, and as the rind would protect the cheese, anyway, it was not important to have very durable cans, so we used a can that was all cardboard, except the top and bottom. Perkins insisted on having the top and bottom of tin, so that the purchaser could have something to open with a can-opener; and he was right. It appealed to the public.

The Perkins cheese made a hit, or at least the Perkins advertising matter did. We boomed it by all the legitimate means, in magazines, newspapers, and street-cars, and on bill-boards and kites; and we got out a very small individual can for restaurant and hotel use. It got to be the fashion to have the waiter bring in a can of Perkins's cheese, and show the diner that it had not been tampered with, and then open it in the diner's sight.

We ran our sales up to six hundred thousand cases the first year, and equalled that in the first quarter of the next year; and then the cheese trust came along, and bought us out for a cool eight-hundred thousand, and all they wanted was the good-will and trade-mark. They had a factory in Wisconsin that could make the cheese more economically. So we were left with the Cloverdale land on our hands, and Perkins decided to make a suburb of it.

Perkins's idea was to make Cloverdale a refined and aristocratic suburb; something high-toned and exclusive, with Queen Anne villas, and no fences; and he was particularly strong on having an ennobling religious atmosphere about it. He said an ennobling religious atmosphere was the best kind of a card to draw to—that the worse a man was, the more anxious he was to get his wife and children settled in the neighborhood of an ennobling religious atmosphere.

So we had a map of Cloverdale drawn, with wide streets running one way and wide avenues crossing the streets at right angles, and our old cheese factory in a big square in the centre of the town. It was a beautiful map, but Perkins said it lacked the ennobling religious atmosphere; so the first thing he did was to mark in a few churches. He began at the lower left-hand corner, and marked in a church at the corner of First Street and First Avenue, and put another at the corner of Second Street and Second Avenue, and so on right up on the map. This made a beautiful diagonal row of churches from the upper right-hand corner to the lower left-hand corner of the map, and did not miss a street. Perkins pointed out the advertising value of the arrangement:

“Cloverdale, the Ideal Home Site.
A Church on Every Street.
Ennobling Religious Atmosphere.
Lots on Easy Payments.”

The old cheese factory was to be the Cloverdale Club-house, and we set to work at once to remodel it. We had the stalls knocked out of the cow-shed, and made it into a bowling-alley, and added a few cupolas and verandas to the factory, and had the latest styles of wall-paper put on the walls, and in a few days we had a first-class club-house.

But we did not stop there. Perkins was bound that Cloverdale should be first-class in every respect, and it was a pleasure to see him marking in public institutions. Every few minutes he would think of a new one and jot it down on the map; and every time he jotted down an opera-house, or a school-house, or a public library, he would raise the price of the lots, until we had the place so exclusive, I began to fear I couldn't afford to live there. Then he put in a street-car line and a water and gas system, and quit; for he had the map so full of things that he could not put in another one without making it look mussy.

One thing Perkins insisted on was that there should be no factories. He said it would be a little paradise right in Cook County. He liked the phrase, “Paradise within Twenty Minutes of the Chicago Post-office,” so well that he raised the price of the lots another ten dollars all around.

Then we began to advertise. We did not wait to build the churches nor the school-house, nor any of the public institutions. We did not even wait to have the streets surveyed. What was the use of having twenty or thirty streets and avenues paved when the only inhabitants were Perkins and I and the old lady who took care of the Club-house? Why should we rush ourselves to death to build a school-house when the only person in Cloverdale with children was the said old lady? And she had only one child, and he was forty-eight years old, and in the Philippines.