"Butter used to be sold in one pound blocks, wrapped in parchment paper and packaged in a cardboard box, until 1906, when a big buyer of butter from a restaurant in New Orleans asked if the butter company could sell butter in packs of four quarter-pound sticks rather than one big lump. They obliged, and the sticks were a hit. At the time, the town of Elgin, Illinois was known as the Butter Capital of the World, home to the famous Elgin Butter Company since 1871. It was with their Elgin Butter Cutter that the East Coast butter size was determined, according to a 1948 paper on the packaging of butter, and that’s how the name Elgin stick was derived.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that the West Coast really got into the butter making game, as reporter Tommy Andres explained on APM’s Marketplace. According to John Bruhn, former director of the Dairy Research and Information Center at the University of California, Davis, “…the size of the cube you see is a result of newer equipment purchased at the time to package the butter.” And that difference has stuck, so much so that even Minnesota-based Land O’ Lakes makes butter in both sizes and ships it out regionally." -MyRecipes
