Some Vermont traditions are measured in generations, and then there is Crowley Cheese. In Healdville, a tiny hamlet of Mount Holly on the back side of Okemo Mountain, cheese has been made commercially since 1824 — longer than almost any other food business in America has done anything. The weathered post-and-beam factory at 14 Crowley Lane, built in 1882 beside a small mountain brook, is the oldest continuously operating cheese factory in the country and a National Historic Place, and the cheese coming out of it today is still made by hand, with hand tools, from the same recipe that started it all.
What Crowley makes is best described as a better cheddar. Officially it is classed as a Colby cheese, a cheddar type, but Crowley's washed-curd recipe came first and gives it a character all its own: the curds are rinsed in fresh water as they are made, a step ordinary cheddar never gets, and the result is moister, creamier and less acidic than regular cheddar, with a wonderful melt and a flavor that sharpens faster as it ages. It is made from fresh, whole raw milk, all natural, with no additives or preservatives — cheese the way it used to be, made in the Green Mountains in the same manner for just over two hundred years.
That one recipe fans out into a whole tasting flight. Crowley is sold at several degrees of sharpness, from mild through medium sharp and sharp to extra sharp and its celebrated Unusually Sharp, which reaches peak sharpness in about three to four years. Alongside the classics are flavored cheeses that have earned their own followings over the years, including sage — long a traditional favorite — garlic chive, fresh chive, smoked, hot pepper and muffaletta, made with a chopped mix of olives. Most Crowley is made with Holstein milk, but the factory also makes a version from grass-fed Jersey A2 milk, made with vegetable rennet, whose higher butterfat gives a noticeably more intense flavor.
The nicest way to meet this cheese is in person, because Crowley is still a working factory that welcomes visitors. The factory shop at 14 Crowley Lane in Mount Holly is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., stocked with Crowley cheeses, free samples to taste, and a friendly selection of other Vermont foods and gifts; cheese is also sold through the online store for anyone who cannot make the trip. Healdville sits off Route 103 between Ludlow and Rutland, about 1.8 miles up Healdville Road — use Mount Holly, not Healdville, in your GPS — not far from the Okemo and Killington ski areas.
If you time it right, you can watch the cheese being made. Cheesemaking by hand takes almost all day: the makers start first thing in the morning, and depending on when you arrive you will see a different stage of the process, from fresh whole milk going into the vats to curds being cut, washed, salted, pressed into wheels and set to age. The factory usually makes cheese four days a week, typically Tuesday through Friday, but it is a tiny operation and the schedule can vary, so the Crowley folks ask visitors hoping to see cheesemaking to call ahead at 802-259-2340 to confirm the day's plan.
The story begins on the farm up the hill. Abraham Crowley started the Crowley farm in Healdville in 1787, and in 1824 the family began making cheese commercially in the farm kitchen, using milk from their neighbors as well as their own — at a time when, as the company notes, the American cheese factory had not yet been invented. In an era before refrigeration, turning surplus milk into cheese was simply the wise thing to do, and nearly every Vermont village had at least one cheesemaker. When the Boston-to-Burlington rail line opened in 1849, with a station at Summit in Mount Holly, Crowley cheese suddenly had a road to much larger markets.
In 1882, A. Winfield Crowley built the present-day factory a few hundred feet from the farmhouse kitchen, opening it as a cooperative with area farmers, and the Crowley name began reaching, in the company's words, the shores of Maine and the streets of Manhattan, shipped out by railroad in big wheels. Winfield presided over the cheesemaking from 1882 until 1935, and by the early twentieth century Crowley was a staple of Vermont general stores. The Crowley family bought out the cooperative in 1937 to become sole owners, and by 1940 production ran year-round rather than just seasonally — a small factory settling in for the long haul.
The long haul needed luck as well as stubbornness. Refrigeration changed everything in the early twentieth century: once farmers could sell fluid milk into a mass market, most small Northeastern cheese factories were quickly abandoned, and cheesemaking largely moved west. Crowley persevered. Winfield's son George ran the factory until 1963, and George's son Robert followed him, until Robert's untimely death in 1966 left no family successor; the neighboring Smith family acquired the business in 1967 and kept it a family operation. Galen and Jill Jones acquired Crowley in 2009 and have run it ever since, with Kenny Hart as cheesemaker for the past 25 years — and the honors kept coming, including a first place in class at the American Cheese Society competition in 2005.
Crowley celebrated its 200th year in 2024, a bicentennial few American businesses of any kind can claim, and it marked the occasion the tastiest way it knew how: by bringing back beloved archival flavors from its vault — caraway, dill and salsa — for a limited holiday-season run alongside longtime favorites like garlic chive and sage. Two centuries in, the factory itself has changed remarkably little since 1882, still post-and-beam, still beside its brook, still relying on the unhurried handwork that made the cheese famous. It remains, happily, a tiny, old-fashioned operation a little off the beaten track in a beautiful, rural corner of southern Vermont.
What comes next is a new chapter of stewardship. In June 2025, Galen and Jill Jones announced that, as they prepare for retirement after owning and operating Crowley since 2009, they are seeking the next passionate steward to carry the legacy forward into its third century. Preserving the integrity of Crowley's recipe and the authenticity of its historic factory has always guided their work, Galen Jones said in announcing the search, adding that they believe the best chapters are still ahead. In the meantime, the vats are warm, the wheels are aging and the samples are out — come taste two hundred years of Vermont history, then explore the Green Mountain National Forest country all around Mount Holly, where the Green Mountain Club's *Day Hiker's Guide to Vermont* is fine further reading for the trails near Healdville. See the full listing on Green Mountain Guide: Crowley Cheese.