Elsie the Cow

Elsie the Cow is a cartoon cow developed as a mascot for the Borden Dairy Company in 1936 to symbolize the "perfect dairy product". Since the demise of Borden in the mid-1990s, the character has continued to be used in the same capacity for the company's partial successors, Eagle Family Foods (owned by J.M. Smucker) and Borden Dairy. Named one of the Top 10 Advertising Icons of the [20th] Century by Ad Age in 2000, Elsie the Cow has been among the most recognizable product logos in the United States and Canada. History The cartoon Elsie was created in 1936 by a team headed by advertising creative director David William Reid. Elsie first appeared as one of four cartoon cows (with Mrs. Blossom, Bessie, and Clara) in a 1936 magazine advertisement series featured in medical journals. By 1939, she was featured in her own advertisement campaign that was voted "best of the year" by the Jury of the 1939 Annual Advertising Awards. The first living Elsie was a registered Jersey heifer selected while participating in Borden's 1939 New York World's Fair "Rotolactor" exhibit (demonstrating the company's invention, the rotary milking parlor). The most alert cow at the demonstration, she was born at Elm Hill Farm in Brookfield, Massachusetts and named "You'll Do, Lobelia". After being purchased from her owners, family farmers from Connecticut, she spent the rest of the season on display twice each day dressed in an embroidered green blanket, and after the exhibit, she traveled around the country making public appearances. You'll Do, Lobelia is buried at her home in the Walker-Gordon Farm in Plainsboro, New Jersey. Her tomb stone is marked with the fitting title of "one of the great Elsies of our time.''