Milk was sold by the pound and I believe the cans were to contain 100 pounds of milk. I remember very well wrestling the cans to the loading platform for pick-up every day. It was a chore for a 10 year old kid. Seems like it was 6-8 cans per day but I could be wrong.
That was long time ago.

After the change to milk tanks, many of the old milk cans were used for used oil. It was quite common to find oil filled cans in old barns.

My first job at 15yrs old - for all of .50/hr - was baling hay on a dairy farm one woodlot and two fields away from our house. They'd call early, like 0600, if they needed me and I could be there in 12minutes if I ran all the way across the fields and through the woodlot. We got fed lunch daily - OMG, was that a feast! This farm lady was legendary locally for her cooking. Lunch was almost always finished with a peach pie about 3" thick and fresh from the oven. It was so hard to go back out and climb onto the hay wagon behind the baler... One of my jobs at lunch was to go into the milk house and dip a gallon jar of fresh cold milk out of the holding tank - it was sooooo good! You don't know what milk is supposed to taste like until you've experienced that. And that farm is still operating and is, I think, the only active dairy farm in the county. Bravo! I made all of $500 that summer and in the end I had every penny of it in a bank account. There's some things you just never forget.

I’ve had a lot of fresh raw milk. When I was little and watching the farmer milking a cow by hand he would say “open up!” and I would open my mouth wide and he’d squirt a stream of warm milk right from the nipple to my mouth. Hardly ever got a drop on my T-shirt.





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Looks like the old feller will be replacing some glass in his greenhouse!! :rotf::rotf:

Spilled Milk
 

I grew up on a little dairy farm in West Michigan in the 40s and 50s. Milked those cows by hand till I joined the Army in 1961. My first shotgun was a single shot 20Ga Savage Hammerless. I would be milking a cow, watch a Ring Neck fly into our pasture the creek flowed through. Finish that cowm grab the shotgun and go after the Phesant. We had both 5 and 10 Gallon cans which we put in a cooling tnk. Best of all a few times each summer we might get a watermelon and cool it down in the milk tank. Nothing better after hauling hay than a slice of cold melon. No RST shells then, Blue Peters were my go to #5s.

them were the good old days....wish kids now could experience those times....charlie

Well T A R N A T I ON !! gents. Quite the trip down memory lane. Cheers Jack:)

I thought it looked like a greenhouse, too, but thought to myself ""If it is, indeed, a greenhouse that must be a prosperous farmer, for that day".

Growing up in the South, and understanding the frugalness of country folk in the era that painting depicts, I couldn't imagine the expense of that much glass, and the other associated costs in building it. It would've been considered extravagance here, in that day. Maybe in New England the economics were different for small farms.

In researching an AAHE 12 ga. owned by a friend i found the original owner to be a world renowned hybridizer of roses from Richmond Virginia. He had acres of greenhouses heated by a central coal fired boiler and according to the newspaper article the first of it's kind in 1890 something.
Depending on what is raised and the control of environment ( orchids) it would be required wherever it was.