09/07/2026
A Labor Day History of The Farmers Alliance Milling Company of Denton
Just don’t call it a Union! Every visitor to Denton takes note of the iconic tower of Morrison Milling Co. (and it’s sign’s missing ‘O‘ since a storm in 2025), but bet you haven’t heard its Labor Day History as a Farmers Alliance Co-Op.
“In the late 1880’s, a group of local farmers formed The Farmers Alliance. The Denton group was active for several years, and by 1886 decided to launch the Alliance Milling Company; this was a co-op that milled the farmers’ wheat into flour to sell. With the formation of the company, the Alliance Mill was built in Denton, and began operating on September 15, 1886.
The Alliance Milling Company became very successful, selling flour to retailers and bakers across North Texas. The mill had a daily capacity of 88,000 pounds and used wheat from the J.W. Underwood farm, a Denton farm located to the west between what became Fouts Field and the Municipal Airport.”
The mill of the Denton Farmer’s Co-Op was more than just successful - it produced award-winning flour. “The Peacemaker Flour from Alliance Milling won first place at the Texas State fair for ten years in a row… so many times, in fact, that the fair had to ban it from being entered into the contest!”
Hold up… There’s some missing context.
The Texas “Farmers Alliance” — rarely discussed in Texas history classes — began in Lampasas County TX during the mid-1870s and grew out of a powerful political and economic “Granger movement” into the 1880s that fought back against high farming debt imposed by banks, predatory middlemen, and railroad monopolies attempting to corner grain markets. What drew most farmers to the Granger movement was the need for unified action against the monopolistic RAILROADS and grain elevators (often owned by the railroads) that charged exorbitant rates for handling and transporting farmers’ crops and other agricultural products.
According to the TSHA, the Farmers' Alliance Milling Company of Denton emulated the successful cooperative enterprises initiated by the Grange movement in the Midwest. In 1888 the 700 stockholders reorganized the mill and renamed it as Alliance Milling Company.
For the next twenty-eight years the mill financially prospered, due largely to the marketing talents of Miller A. Grant of Buffalo, New York [and] national success from the mill's production of its award-winning brand known nationally as Peacemaker Flour.
Alliance Milling’s Peacemaker Flour earned international gold medals, including at the 1900 Paris Exposition and the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. In Texas, the brand was so dominant that after Denton’s Peacemaker Flour won first place at the Texas State Fair for ten consecutive years, until it was rudely banned from competition in 1921.
The ban was not due to safety or quality violations, but rather its overwhelming success and clear superiority over other competitors. The flour had a Blue Ribbon streak at the fair consecutively for almost two decades — some tracking its mostly uninterrupted dominance between 1904 to 1921. While official accounts claimed Alliance Milling was “banned from the competition to give other mills an opportunity to win,” a closer look at Texas Labor history of the 1920s presents more nefarious motives. Union-busting by the state and a ‘Red Scare’ panic over post-WWI labor organizing made the former Farmers Cooperative a target of Big Money Agriculture barons. This would trigger the decline of the cooperative groups.
Today, Labor Day stands for little more than the end of summer and the start of school, weekend-long sales, and maybe a barbecue or parade during the 3-day weekend. But it was originally meant to honor both the individual worker and what workers accomplish together through activism and collective organizing.
https://dentoncountyhistoryandculture.wordpress.com/2018/08/03/a-historic-denton-county-business-morrison-milling-co/
