Cheese Friday: NOOOOOO!!!!

Mormons buy Cheese factory

By RON FIELDS
rfields@thehawkeye.com

NAUVOO, Ill. — The shuttered cheese factory here is slated to be demolished after its purchase by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter–day Saints.

The Mormon church purchased the Nauvoo Blue Cheese plant for $100,000 from food conglomerate ConAgra Foods, based in Omaha, Neb.

According to Barbara Renouf, a public affairs missionary for Historic Nauvoo, workers already have begun to dismantle the plant. She expects the razing of the building to begin in earnest next week.

"I think it will be taken down and probably grassed over," she said.

The factory has a long history in Nauvoo. Blue cheese was a traditional food brought to the area by the Icarians, a French utopian movement that moved into the area following the exodus of the Mormons in 1846.

Nauvoo Blue Cheese began in 1937, when cheesemaker Oscar Rhode founded the company, taking advantage of the area's limestone caves — caves that provided the constant temperature needed to cure the cheese.

The factory remained family–owned until 1987, when it was sold to St. Louis cream cheese maker Raskas Co. In 1999, Raskas sold the company to ConAgra, which renamed the factory Beatrice Cheese–Nauvoo.

"There's nothing left in the place," said Bob Hopp, one of several Nauvoo–area residents attempting to revive the blue cheese industry in the Illinois river town. "It's just a big, empty building."

The cheese plant, formerly a brewery before it was purchased by Rhode in 1937, occupies nearly an entire city block in Nauvoo near the the Joseph Smith Academy. It was surrounded on three sides by property owned by the Salt Lake City–based Mormon church, which in 2002 dedicated a rebuilt temple in Nauvoo.