Fathers’ Day Surprise

[mobirdhunter]

An enjoyable thread. Keep the stories coming!

[Richard Flanders]

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.

[todd allen]

This has been a great thread! Lately, I have been thinking about how many of us grew up around, and were influenced by family, and family friends who were born in the 1800s.
We are like a bridge that spans, and touches 3 different centuries.
That's something to ponder. Us oldsters are like a link in a long chain.

[randallro]

My grandma was born on a dairy farm in the Catskills in the late 1800's. No indoor plumbing or electricity. no paved roads. cars existed but no one they knew had one. Before the Wright brothers. She lived to see a man walk on the moon. We have had a great technologic leap in our lives but i doubt any generation will ever see a leap like that again. meanwhile my 120 year old Parker defies time......

[stumpstalker]

These are insightful observations.

I believe it was the American historian Frederick Lewis Allen who wrote that prior to World War I, 90% of Americans grew up on farms. A more recent source I found said that by the 1980s it was down to 2%.

So, what was once a way-of-life for the majority of the U. S. population, is now as just a memory for an aging cohort, and is actually practiced by a slim segment among us.

[Stan Hillis]

I grew up on my grandaddy's farm. I live in the same house on that farm that he moved into in 1919, and farm the same land he bought that year, and have for some 51 years. My son farms with me, and as of last August his son farms with us, too. Legacies are strong, and the roots run deep.

But, none of us know anything (aside from what I've learned here) about milk cans.

[mobirdhunter]

Originally Posted by Stan Hillis

I grew up on my grandaddy's farm. I live in the same house on that farm that he moved into in 1919, and farm the same land he bought that year, and have for some 51 years. My son farms with me, and as of last August his son farms with us, too. Legacies are strong, and the roots run deep.

But, none of us know anything (aside from what I've learned here) about milk cans.

Stan, we live in the heart of farm country here on the Missouri/Iowa line and have friends and acquaintances who have farmed family land for generations as you describe. That trend is sadly waining and many of the next generation are seeking other lifestyles away from the farm. Lots of land here, especially in Missouri, is being taken over by large scale farming operations, those that produce and process on a large scale (some owned by foreign countries, like China). Still, Missouri has a high percentage of small, family farms, and it continues to be a way of life cherished many good people who love what they do...and the land where they do it.

And, I do know what a milk can is, but not by first-hand knowledge. My father told me about his experiences on the farm, and about "his" cow, etc. We find old cans with some frequency in the overgrown ditches that hold a covey now and then.