Live Oak Creamery
Live Oak Creamery was a dairy factory in Gilroy, California, started in 1908. It was Gilroy’s first butter factory and the area’s only insulated building.
The one-story brick building measured about 37 by 96 feet and later added a refrigeration room, packaging area, milk sales space, and milk testing room. It could produce up to 1,000 pounds of butter each day, and the first butter batch was made on March 30, 1908.
After founder Oscar Learnard died in 1911, his wife Mary and their son Tracy ran the creamery, and William Garlock became manager in 1917, adding a pasteurizer and homogenizer in 1919. Garlock & Cook bought the creamery in 1920–1921.
In the early 1920s, Walter Luchessa and his brothers bought the factory in 1925 and shifted production to cheese, making Monterey Jack and cheddar. The cheeses were shipped by railroad. In the mid-1930s, the Zottola Brothers leased the factory and continued cheese production along with a retail shop.
Original operations ended in 1945. The building later served many uses, including an electrician’s workshop, a loan office, a laundromat, a Jehovah’s Witness hall, and a spinning-wheel workshop in 1976.
A fire gutted the wood-and-brick building in November 1984. The Live Oak Creamery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 11, 1982, for its role as Gilroy’s first butter factory and the area’s only insulated structure, reflecting the dairy industry’s history.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 15:53 (CET).