Just a few weeks before the start of the Illinois State Fair, an emergency threatened one of its most popular and longest-running attractions.
Bessie the Life-Size Cow Made Entirely of Butter! was still just a few hundred pounds of butter blocks sitting in a cooler, and the Iowa dairy farmer who has been sculpting the fatty doyenne every year for the last 27 years had suddenly become ill and couldn’t come to town.
“I was in a panic,” says Dick Moore, manager of the Dairy Building. “I mean, who are you going to find to turn 600 pounds of butter into a cow at this late date?”
Fortunately for Moore and the Bessie fans who flock to see her each year, there is a thriving community of butter artists who can sculpt just about anything. The Butter Elvis, for instance, presided over the Iowa State Fair this summer.
So Moore soon found and hired a butter sculptor from Detroit who mobilized his “Butter Cow Team” last month. They managed to put together a very lifelike Bessie in time for the fair, which ends Sunday. The cow stands where butter cows have stood since 1922, encased in an ice-cold Dairy Building stall.
Some have noticed the difference. True devotees–the dairy farmers and 4-H alums, for instance–have noted the more rotund abdomen, the slightly in-turned forefoot, the less-pronounced vein running across the belly to the udder. This year’s cow is clearly not the work of the farmer whose craft they’ve admired for 27 years.
“The milk vein. It’s definitely different,” said a critical Ron Wolf, a Downstate farmer and former dairy cattle competition judge who checked on the cow.
“Yeah, you know, modern cows look a lot different,” said Bob Linley, an owner of a dairy in Downstate Walnut. “They’re considerably bigger all over.”
Butter sculpture is nothing short of folk art, say butter artisans, who ply their trade at state fairs not just in the Midwest, but in states from New York to California. It’s more common than cheese carvings and more appetizing than the lard pigs pork producers once tried as an industry promotion.
“It’s a beautiful-looking material, butter,” says Tom Paul Fitzgerald, a Wayne State University art professor and sculptor of this year’s Bessie. “This is a kind of celebration of the plenty of the farm. Ultimately, that’s what the ceremonial energy is. We are proud of what farmers have done.
“It probably started with somebody trying to make butter pats in fancy designs, and then they just went crazy.”
Fitzgerald takes an academic view of the craft because his real job is teaching sculpture. When he took up butter sculpting a few years ago, he researched cows like an academic. Fitzgerald creates his replicas for the Michigan State Fair based on studious analysis of old bovine anatomy books.
This accounts for the difference between Fitzgerald’s bovines and those of Norma “Duffy” Lyon, who has been making the Illinois State Fair cow since 1970. Dairy cows’ bodies have changed a lot since those anatomy books were written, due to new breeding practices and technological advances. They’re taller and bigger, with shorter necks and flatter tummies.
“Duffy knows every vein, every hair, every dimple and every pimple on a cow,” said dairy manager Moore. “She knows art, but she also knows cows.”
Duffy Lyon is gracious about Fitzgerald’s work, acknowledging him as a serious, trained artist, which she wasn’t when she got started in the 1960s.
Butter cow carving dates back to at least 1922, the date on a yellowed newspaper clipping depicts a scrawny butter jersey at the Illinois fair. Dairy historians figure the practice couldn’t have started much earlier, because there wasn’t refrigeration available to keep a butter statue from turning into a butter puddle in summer heat.
But today’s artists have taken the art form to new heights. A New York artist, for instance, once made a butter statue of Princess Anne and her horse. Duffy Lyon has re-created an entire Norman Rockwell scene out of butter and sculpted Smokey Bear and Elvis for various fairs.
“You should have seen the lines out of the building when I made Garth Brooks at the Iowa fair four seasons back,” Lyon said.
In butter sculpture, artists usually build a frame of wood and chicken wire, then slather on hundreds of pounds of butter–roughly $1,000 worth in the case of this year’s Illinois statue–to make a hefty, hollow cow. Fitzgerald uses a pressurized caulking gun to apply the butter, cooled to 40 to 50 degrees. Lyon does her cows strictly by hand.
Lyon suffered a mild stroke earlier this summer, but she hopes to be back at work in time for next year’s fair circuit.
“Some people come to the fair just to see the butter cow,” said Tom Roth, general manager of the American Dairy Association of Illinois. “While they’re there, they learn something about the goodness of dairy products.”
Neither Roth nor Lyon think a 600-pound cow made of dairy products is even slightly bizarre.
“You see centerpieces made out of food all the time,” said Roth. “You don’t think that’s weird.”
But Moore is sure some visitors come by to marvel at the sheer strangeness of it all.
“The idea of anything so absurd as a butter cow–there’s just something about it,” he said. “But it’s funny how that surprise turns to appreciation pretty quick.”