Not everyone longs for the "good, old days," but it's a pretty good bet that if you ask some Greene County locals to recall their happy days of the 1950s and 1960s many would say it would be eating a double-dip ice cream cone at Bryan's Dairy.
Just the mention of the business that started out in 1928 as Waynesburg Sanitary Dairy Co. on East High Street conjures up as many memories as the quantity of dairy products sold to thousands of customers before the business closed in the mid-1980s.
But Bryan's Dairy was more than just an ice cream parlor; it was a Greene County institution where milk, cottage cheese and the ice cream were all produced on site in the dairy and sold either through milk truck delivery routes or at the retail store that was part of the manufacturing plant.
The dairy received raw milk from numerous Greene County farmers, and a fleet of drivers delivered milk to everyone around the vicinity of Waynesburg. Bryan delivery trucks operated on five routes into all sections of the county, covering more than 300 miles a day. Service was provided to Blacksville, W.Va., Mt. Morris, Jefferson, Carmichaels, Rices Landing, as well as Waynesburg and Franklin Township.
The Bryan family patriarch was James Bryan Sr., the first of the Bryans to be involved in the dairy business, but he certainly wasn't the last.
According to the historical account by G. Wayne Smith, "the building, by June 1924, the manufacturing plant of the Greene County Ice and Dairy Products Co., was ready for use. It was located on the east end of town on the south side of High Street, east of the Chevrolet garage." In November 1928, John Kennedy Bryan, James' son, began Waynesburg Sanitary Dairy, created by the merger of the dairies of James Bryan and Son, J.M. Strosnider, Robert W. Nichols and the dairy department of Greene County Ice and Dairy Products.
When John Kennedy Bryan died in 1943, his son, Frank, became the manager until his death on March 22, 1972. Other Bryans associated with the business were Bill Bryan, John Henry Bryan and Woody Bryan.
The retail store was an important part of the dairy's business. Countless high school and college students worked part time at the store while attending school.
The late Miles Davin wrote in a reflective piece several years ago, "In the summertime, it was hell working there because the store would be packed three and four deep with people holding their fingers up, designating how many cones they wanted."
Farley Toothman, a Waynesburg attorney, Greene County socicitor and judicial nominee, also worked there.
"I started working there when I was 14 years old," he said. "I did some work on the delivery routes, washed the trucks and helped in the retail store," he said. "This was about as local an operation as you could find. At my house, we knew Bryan's Dairy products. It was a lot of fun eating cottage cheese and to know exactly how it was made, who made it and how it got there."
He said there would be six or seven people behind the counter serving the public on Saturdays and Sundays. "You could always tell how busy you were by the amount of ice cream you had on your elbow from bending down in the cases," he said. By the time he was 16, Toothman moved on. He said his girlfriend's father had bought a service station across the street and had offered him a job pumping gas.
"Now that I had a car, gasoline was a little more important than ice cream," he said.
During those decades of the '50s and '60s, the cost of the cones was deliberately kept low. A generous single scoop was only 5 cents; a double scoop was 10 cents.
As Sue Turner of Richhill Street, Waynesburg, whose mother, Thelma Bryan Turner, worked many years as a bookkeeper at the dairy, said, "By today's standards, the ice cream would be called gourmet. The best quality flavoring ingredients were used, and today's fat-conscious consumers wouldn't even want to know how much cream was used in the ice cream mix."
An early newspaper account said on a busy weekend, as many as 14,000 cones would be sold and long lines were always a common sight during warm summer weekends.