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Home North Carolina Forsyth County City of Winston-Salem Historical Markers Guernsey Cattle
     

Guernsey Cattle

NC-150 at Nelson Street, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
  North Carolina State Historical Marker
 
    North Carolina State
Historical Marker
    Marker Text:
"The first registered Guernsey cattle in N.C. were brought from Pa. by Dr. H. T. Bahnson, 1882, to his farm that lay south of this road."
     The first registered Guernsey cattle in North Carolina were purchased in West Grove, Pennsylvania, by Dr. H .T. Bahnson and brought to his Forsyth County farm in 1882. His purchase from the Pennsylvania company Thomas H. Harvey and Son was for one bull, Amber Chief, and two cows, Trefoil and Zada. Trefoil gave birth to the first registered Guernsey born in North Carolina on May 6, 1884. The cow, which was sired by Amber Chief, was named North Carolina. On April 16, 1884, Sedgefield became the first Guernsey bull to be born in the state.

     In November 1886 Bahnson purchased another bull, Squire of Salem. He appears twice in the pedigree of Questa, the granddam of Dolly Dimple who became the World’s Record Guernsey Cow in 1909. North Beatrice, bred by Dr. Bahnson and sired by the Squire of Salem, made another important contribution to the Guernsey breed in America. Henry M. Johnson of Winston-Salem purchased North Beatrice and used her to develop a very large herd.

     It was reported that at one time, through North Beatrice and her half-sister Questa, the blood of Squire of Salem could be found in almost every part of the United States. Several other famous cattle can be traced back to Dr. Bahnson and North Carolina’s original herd of Guernsey cattle. By 1950 Forsyth County had become a banner county in the breeding of Guernsey and Holstein-Friesian milk cows as well as Hereford beef cattle.

     

References:
Adelaide Fries, Stuart Thurman Wright, and J. Edwin Hendricks, Forsyth: A History of a County on the March (1976)
North Carolina Museum of History: History Highlights: http://ncmuseumofhistory.org/nchh/nineteenth.html#1881-1899