In 1925, Orlando was still a small but growing city when World War I veteran Thomas Gilbert Lee started a dairy business. With his wife, Elizabeth, and their newborn at his side, the Lees built a 10-by-10-foot milking shed beside the family barn on Bumby Avenue between Colonial Drive and Robinson Street.
They began with one Jersey cow, named Hopper. To expand, Lee turned to his father, citrus grower C.G. Lee, who co-signed a note for another cow and a calf. That modest start, built on borrowed money and sleepless nights, grew into the company Orlando still knows today.
A MOOVING SCENE — A motorcyclist blasts past the gazing cows on the mural that adorns the T.G. Lee dairy building in Orlando, Thursday, July 20, 2023. Located east of downtown in the Milk District, the 200-foot mural was designed by Orlando artist Chris Jones in 2019. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel)
Lee’s education was anything but traditional. He left public school at 13, then studied three years in Rollins College’s business program. In 1914 he attended the University of Florida’s agriculture program, paying his way by waking at 3:30 a.m. to milk cows for $2 a week. When the U.S. entered World War I, he joined the Army Signal Corps and served as a crew chief servicing airplanes. That mix of discipline and training helped him when he turned to dairying.
“Late to bed and early to rise became the order of the day,” one article recalled. Lee said he and Elizabeth often got by on just three hours of sleep. “If my wife didn’t have a lot of dishpans and alarm clocks, I never would have made it,” he said. After Lee finished milking, Elizabeth filled the bottles, and he sealed them with simple caps from the hardware store before heading out on deliveries. “We had no equipment, no inspection,” he later said. “It doesn’t seem so long ago.”
At first, the dairy sold wholesale to an ice cream plant. Soon the Lees began bottling their own milk and adding customers one by one. That meant creating a delivery system of their own. Orlando residents remembered their adapted Model T Ford coupe, “a far cry from the modern refrigerated trucks.” On weekdays, Lee fitted a wooden box into the trunk and hung a painted sign on the car door. On Sundays, the sign came off, the trunk lid went back on, and the car became the family’s ride to church.
For families before refrigeration, milk delivery meant bottles left at the doorstep each morning. Customers rinsed and returned their empties, and the milkman left full bottles in exchange. Children often dashed outside at dawn to grab the bottles before breakfast, the day beginning with the clink of milk on the porch.
Even with just a few cows, Lee had a philosophy. “I felt my customers were entitled to the best milk they could get and the best service I could deliver,” he said. Quality and service became the cornerstones of the dairy. Those values carried the Lees through the Great Depression, when steady buyers kept the farm afloat. Rollins College became a dependable customer, and Morrison’s Cafeteria placed large orders, providing income when many dairies failed.
In 1934, the Lees built a milking parlor on Bumby Avenue. It quickly became a local attraction. “Crowds gathered at milking time to see cows ushered into the parlor and milked by machine in the sanitary spotlessness of porcelain and stainless steel surroundings,” one Orlando Sentinel reporter wrote. The modern parlor reassured customers at a time when many still remembered unsafe raw milk. Lee often reflected on how much had changed. “There have been so many changes,” he said. “But the two most significant advances have been pasteurization and homogenization.” The parlor did not survive World War II, when parts were impossible to replace. By then, though, the dairy had already grown into the largest in Orlando.
Thomas and Elizabeth Lee are buried in Greenwood Cemetery, just a few miles from where they built their first milking shed. From a cow named Hopper and a homemade bottling line, the Lees built a company that has supplied milk to Orlando for a century. Its plant still stands on Robinson Street and gave the surrounding neighborhood its name, the Milk District. The iconic sign on the plant that proclaims “T.G. Lee – Since 1925” remains a familiar sight to Orlando drivers. Much of the grazing land that once surrounded the dairy, where hundreds of cows once roamed, was later developed into Colonial Plaza, a reminder of how quickly the city grew up around the Lees’ pastures.
The Lees’ story is inseparable from the city’s. From that first cow to a district named for their plant, and finally to their resting place at Greenwood, their lives are written into Orlando’s landscape and memory. Generations have poured T.G. Lee milk into glasses, cereal bowls and coffee cups, keeping alive the legacy of a couple whose hard work shaped a city.
Sarah Boye is a graduate researcher in public history at UCF and has worked extensively on community history projects in the area.
