My grandparents had a farm in Michigan that my family eventually moved onto in the early 60's. I can remember in the middle and late 50's visiting the farm when it was being worked with draft horses in wheat fields - my grandfather didn't like the new fangled tractors. I can vividly remember watching them work the field nearest the house and of walking around the giant horses when they'd bring them into the yard in harness. After they quit growing grain they still had cows that were tended and hand milked by a crusty and aged farm hand named John Gruber who lived with his wife in a small house below the farm house. They put the milk into cans like that and put them into a horse trough full of cold well water in a pump house that had originally been driven by a wind mill, but by then was driven by a 3HP electric motor that must have weighed at least 250#. There was no running water in the house, which was built in the early 1840's and had no insulation aside from soy bean stalks in the walls; it all had to be hauled in with buckets, which I did a lot when staying with them. This cold water bath kept the milk cool until the milk truck picked it up. To get the full cans from the pump house to the daily milk truck they were put onto a brilliant little cart that had 3ft diameter light-weight steel wheels and a low-slung deck that was no more than 4" off the ground and which would hold 4 cans. That way you didn't have to pick the heavy cans up at all as the cart deck would rock forward and rest on the ground. You just tipped them and rotated them onto the deck. Even I could do it as a 10yr old. I sure couldn't hoist them out of the cold water bath though! I can't remember if they dumped the cans into a tank on the truck or just took them and brought them back the next day. I think they just took them and brought them back rinsed out. The cans on this magazine cover are being drained and dried after being washed out. I feel very privileged to have experienced and seen all that before we all bought our pasteurized milk in cartons at Krogers....that wasn't that long ago really. Seems like yesterday to me; that's how much that all stuck with me over the past 65yrs. If that pump house were still there, I could walk in there today blindfolded and know right where to reach for the pump switch.
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