![]() ![]() Soon there was a local restaurant owner that wanted to carry the product if she ever started a "legit" operation and come 1983, Cypress Grove was born. At first Mary gave the cheese away but, eventually, people began to pay for it. She used yogurt for her first cultures and had no formal training in dairy science or cheesemaking. And as you can imagine, this was more milk than they could use at home, so neighbors would leave jars for her to fill and eventually she began experimenting with cheesemaking. At one point, she had 50 goats - milking them by hand daily. She joined the Humboldt County Goat Association and began showing and breeding. This was some real hippie stuff – a true back-to-the-land lifestyle.Īs time went on and her daughters got a little older, Mary became their 4-H leader and her love for these animals deepened. They sourced water from a spring, harvested food from their garden, made their own soap and even sewed their own clothes. There she built a 16'x 16' cabin near the woods. In the early 70's Mary moved with her girls and the two alpine goats to an 80-acre piece of land in Humboldt County. She brought two goats home – her daughters named them Hazel and Esmeralda. ![]() Eventually they came closer and closer until she was able to grab one by the horns. She replied, “Honey, if you can catch 'em, you can have 'em.” So Mary put grain in her hands and tried to coax them for days. One day she asked the woman next door if she could buy one of the goats to provide milk for her girls. Their home was next to a cow dairy owned by a family who kept wild goats on the property for brush control. ![]() She landed in Sonoma, California with a dream of living off the land with her four daughters. In 1968 after attending the infamous DNC in Chicago, Mary packed up her VW van and headed west. It’s about taking the road less traveled….and in Mary’s case, the road to California. But this story is more than an entrepreneurial tale of hard work and passion - it’s about guts and grit. Founder of Cypress Grove and a pioneer in American cheesemaking, Mary Keehn is living proof that if you follow your heart and work really (really) hard- you can turn that labor of love into a way to support your family and in her case, a whole community. ![]()
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