The Milk House

In our previous installment of Stuff That Used to Be Around Big Maple Lake, I mentioned the lingering remains of what appears to have been a small terracotta-block building with electricity. Here's the building those ruins seem to resemble:


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Chester Wasy.

A milk house is where the full milk cans were kept cool in tanks of water until they could be shipped to the milk-bottling factory. In Henry Nolte's time, the electrical pump that drew water into the tanks was controlled by a big throw-switch on the wall. That switch always sparked when you turned it on, which scared the little neighbor kid who would tell me about it 80 years later.

That wheeled contraption out front is a milk cart, built to carry cans of milk from the barn to the milk house, and from the milk house to the truck that would carry them away to their rendezvous with destiny.



The problem I have with connecting this building to the foundation among the trees east of Big Maple Lake (small foundation, bits of terracotta blocks, porcelain insulators and shreds of metal wire) is that, as we see from the photo, the milk house was right next to the main house, and the ruins out in the woods that seem to correspond to the main house are at some distance from the little foundation. So I must be wrong about something, and perhaps many things.