We explore the role of elites for development and in particular for the spread of cooperative creameries in Denmark in the 1880s, which was a major factor behind that country's rapid economic catch-up. We demonstrate empirically that the location of early proto-modern dairies, so-called hollænderier, introduced onto traditional landed estates as part of the Holstein System of agriculture by landowning elites from the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein in the eighteenth century, can explain the location of cooperative creameries in 1890, more than a century later, after controlling for other relevant determinants. We interpret this as evidence that areas close to estates which adopted the Holstein System witnessed a gradual spread of modern ideas from the estates to the peasantry. Moreover, we identify a causal relationship by utilizing the nature of the spread of the Holstein System around Denmark, and the distance to the first estate to introduce it, Sofiendal. These results are supported by evidence from a wealth of contemporary sources and are robust to a variety of alternative specifications. We would like to thank Philipp Ager, Sascha Becker, Per Boje, David de la Croix, Carl-Johan Dalgaard, Jeremiah Dittmar, Alice Fabre, Giovanni Federico, James Fenske, Nicola Gennaioli, Ingrid Henriksen, Anton Howes, Pablo Martinelli, Joel Mokyr, Nathan Nunn, Cecilia Garcia Penalosa, Jared Rubin, and James Simpson for helpful comments and suggestions. Moreover, we would like to thank conference and workshop participants at the 2017 World Congress of Cliometrics in Strasbourg, the Agricliometrics II in Zaragoza, the CAGE/CEPR Economic History Conference in Abu Dhabi, the 2016 Social Science History Association meeting in Chicago, the CREA 2016 workshop in Luxembourg, the MEHR end of semester workshop 2016 at Copenhagen University, Simposio de la Asociación Española de Economía 2015 in Girona, the 2017 Economic History Society Conference, the 2017 workshop on ‘Elite human capital and the role of modernity: The East versus the West’ in Marseille, as well as seminar participants at the University of Santiago, the Catholic University of Chile, the Central Bank of Chile, Lund University, George Mason University, Remnin University, the Central University of Finance and Economics (Beijing), the University of South Australia, the London School of Economics, the University of Duisburg-Essen, the University of Bonn, and the University of Siena. Finally, we would also like to thank Dorte Kook Lyngholm from the Dansk Center for Herregårdsforskning (Danish Research Center for Manorial Studies) for sending us some of the data on the estates. Markus Lampe acknowledges funding from Fundación Ramón Areces, and Paul Sharp gratefully acknowledges funding from the Danish Council for Independent Research: this paper is part of his Sapere Aude grant no. DFF-6109-00123.