Cream Separator Sign

 When we visited the local historical society with our friends who visited in October, I told the curator about our cream separator sign and showed him photos.  Later by email he asked if he could do a historical society email about it.  Apparently this is something he does weekly.  I said, sure, and sent him the photos with explanations.

Here is his preamble to the photos.

Marcia Brown sent us these photographs of a sign she and her husband, Dan, who live in the Flat, found in their barn.  It is an advertisement for a device that was used to separate cream from milk.  At the bottom of the sign is the name Huggins, who was the Superintendent of the C****** Creamery.  There is a picture of him in Child(vol 1, p.184) with this caption: "C****** Creamery. Burt E. Huggins, Sperintendent, 1910.").  The Creamery was located just south of the Flat in what is now the home of Henry Homeyer and Cindy Heath.

Guess we'll never know how the sign ended up the Brown Barn.

#1 Original location of sign in the barn - attached to the barn wall and looking like a chalkboard.

#2 Sign removed from barn to clean it up.

#3 Backside of sign (photo upside down) showing mailing address.

#4 Sign installed in our loft/rec room in the barn.

Here are some of the more detailed comments he has received.

That is INCREDIBLE! What a beautiful sign. Every day I hope to find a gift from the Wellmans buried somewhere in this house, but so far I've only turned up mouse droppings. 

The cream separator was one of the great breakthrough inventions in the food processing industry. Prior to its adoption the separation of cream from whole milk relied on simply allowing the milk to sit and waiting for the cream to rise to the top. In the case of the C****** Creamery I'm quite sure that initially it used the practice of having the milk "set." That meant pouring the fresh whole milk into large flat pans and leaving it overnight. In the morning it would be "skimmed" for the risen cream. Chances are it would "set" a few hours longer to get a little more cream, and then the "skim milk" would be poured out of the pans and either dumped or taken back to the farms to be fed to calves and hogs. Needless to say, setting milk was very unsanitary--imagine the flies--and the separator not only saved time and labor, it greatly enhanced food safety. Most cream at creameries like C****** would be churned into butter on site, salted and shipped downcountry. A principal of C****** Creamery was Fred H. Rogers of Meriden, a very progressive farmer, politician and leader of the state Grange movement. That sign is a priceless piece of C****** history and deserves preservation. I once gave the C****** Historical Society a medal which had been won by your town's other creamery, The Hillside, for its butter at a major competition--I hope it has been accorded proper care and safekeeping. 

I grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where my family also operated a small retail milk processing and house to house bottled milk and cream delivery business. The separator was an essential part of the operation. I recall many hours spent, as a child, turning the crank and watching skim milk flowing from one spout, and heavy cream from the other. Cleaning the separator daily was a tiresome exercise, as the internal workings are basically a stack of (many) cone shaped stainless steel discs that spin at a high speed throwing the heavier cream from the whole milk to the outside of the stack (as I best recall). A rudimentary centrifuge, I suppose. As time went on homogenized milk became the favored product, but my dad, right to the end, catered to a few of his old heavy cream customers. By then, he had rigged an electric motor replacing the “child power.”

The last time I recall seeing the old deLaval separator was on the scrap metal pile behind the barn. The photo of the sign and your comments brought back some fond memories. Thank you.

My grandmother, Mable Graham, had her hand-cranked separator mounted on the sideboard in the pantry. She had two cows...a Jersey and a Guernsey...and peddled milk and cream to the summer people down on "the point." When she filled the glass milk bottles, sometimes the cream came almost half way down the bottle. Nana's delivery vehicle was an old Buick with one missing door. Carlton, the hired man, drove. Nana always owned a car, but never learned to drive. 

Apparently our sign has generated lots of memories.