Milk Can

They held 10 gallons. And because they were rather heavy to begin with, they weighed about 110 pounds when loaded.

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Batavia Museum

Kolton Olson added

Note the milk can being used as a hitch stand. This is the type of milk can my grandfather used on his dairy farm before they switched to the pipeline and bulk tank. Kolton posted to a closed group, but I you can access the album of 30 pictures of other antique farm equipment  if you are a Facebook member.

Update: a video of a dairy back when milk was delivered with cans rather than bulk milk trucks. First they unload them. Do they weigh and sample each can or a batch of all the cans that came from one farm? The later would require some sort of marking and more careful placement in the box car of the "milk run" trains. Then you can see them putting the cans in and out of the washer. I wish someone would narrate it. I can guess what some of the equipment is. For example, I think the big round tank with a lid is a pasteurizer. I was surprised to see that a dairy would have a lathe.

Screenshot at -1.22
This shows that they do keep track of which cans came from which farm.

At 1:03 in this video, you can see someone pulling a cart with at least three milk cans getting ready to put them on the arriving train.

KeokukUnionDepot
Photographer F. J. Bandholts captured this panoramic view of the Keokuk Union Depot in 1907. The photo shows
how the Depot is situated between the Mississippi River and the bluff. Image from Library of Congress [Note the milk cans being loaded into the baggage area of the first car of the passenger train. It looks like there is a baggage cart full of cans at the corner of the depot and two horse&wagons half full of milk cans. It appears it would take longer to handle the milk cans during the train's stop at the depot than it would to unload and load passengers. There is also a baggage cart next to the tender that is full of packages. Remember, this is the era of catalog stores, not big box retail stores. They would have to carefully pack the baggage compartment in the car to hold all of those packages and cans. And this is just one stop that the train would be serving.]

Clare Union Railroad Depot posted two photos with the comment:

101 TREASURES OF THE CLARE UNION DEPOT: PART 17

                               10 GALLON MILK CANS

The Clare Union Depot was at one time a central hub for milk collection and distribution in mid-Michigan. The Ann Arbor Railroad recognized this, and in fact opened up their own creamery in Clare to supply their entire system’s dining cars with milk, cream, and butter. The Ann Arbor Creamery was in business until the early 1930s when they sold the trackside plant near the depot to Kraft who continued to operate the facility for several more decades.

The railroads served an important part in providing fresh milk to larger urban areas where dairy farms were scarce, and where unscrupulous city producers often watered down the milk, fed their cows with used grain and mash from distilleries, and/or added chalk to whiten their product , all of which earned its moniker “swill milk”.  Since fresh raw milk spoils quickly and is quite perishable, and since the days of safe, rapid road transport were in the distant future, cities like Clare served an important role.

(Note the milk cans in the depot photo from the early 1900s. These 10 gallon cans weighed nearly 110 pounds full, and even though the heavy gauge metal cans were handed roughly every step of the way, they were durable, stackable, and easy to clean. Railroad fee agreements for shipping full cans guaranteed free return of empties to the origin point.)

We have copies of way-bills of cream and milk carried on Ann Arbor passenger trains (faster than and more stops than freights) to dozens of cities around 1911, and even a detailed list of the 241 shipments from Clare in August, 1923, when the railroad collected $91.00 in fees. Cans were delivered that month to Swift Creamery in Alma, Beatrice Creamery in Durand, and Cadillac’s Sheery & Goodenough. 

For more information on the glory days of and the origin of milk runs in railroading history, stop by and see our exhibit at the Clare Union Depot, or go to thehenryford.com and read their article “Moving Milk on the Railroad “

Stay safe

[I did not realize that they weighed over 100 pounds. The can itself was rather heavy. My uncle would have to left the loaded cans in and out of the cooler. The cooler held refrigerated water and the walls were higher than the height of the cans.]

Robert Warrick shared

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The day after I came across the above post, I saw this post. Milk cans were used until the 1960s when glass pipelines and bulk tanks became available.

Jeff Farley posted
How the milk was collected from farms before the advent of tankers.
[There are 1,619 comments on this post.]

The bucket he is pouring into a milk can is the bottom part of a milker.

John Neiley posted
[The funnel like thing held a strainer.]

And this is what that bucket looked like during milking. The hose going off to the right behind the cow is going up to a vacuum line that went around the barn. It is what powered the milker.

24:28 video @ 18:00