Transcription
Posie: I’m Posy Shaw. My maiden name is Christianson, so I grew up as Posey Christianson in Lutheranville in Schoharie County. My grandparents bought our farmhouse in 1937, and it has been in the family ever since. I recall a time, probably around 1967 68, when I was a kid, and the Lutheranville road was a dirt road, and we would walk from our house to the neighbor’s house to help with haying and farm chores every day. And the walk from my house to the neighbors who were the Killeen Burger family. Was probably less than a mile, and in that walk we would pass three fully functional dairy farms with their barns and their pastures and all their equipment on our way. And now when I drive that road, which is now blacktop, there isn’t one barn left.
The advent of bulk milk pickup in the county was not attainable for many of the smaller dairies. Many of these farms had under 30 head that they were milking, and they couldn’t afford to transition from canned pick up to the bulk milk, milking parlors. That would be necessary. So as a kid, I remember very clearly the milking happening, the milk being poured into cans that would then go into cold water, refrigerators that were stored until the milk truck came and they would drop off your empties and pick up your full cans, and many times bring them down to Cobleskill to Mountain View Dairy, where the milk was processed and packaged, and we all drank Mountain View Dairy Milk around here.
The dairy would keep track of whose cans, came from which farms because they were all numbered. So, that way you got your cans back and the milk was all weighed. And that’s how the farmers were paid by the weight that was brought in, and that was how the records were kept. One fun memory I have is come around 4th of July or a special holiday. We would buy a watermelon and bring it into the milk house and throw it into the refrigerated water. And then by the time you were ready to have watermelon after the picnic, it would be ice cold because watermelons float in water. And, that was always such a lovely treat. At the end of the day, I miss seeing those barns a lot.