Early
Ut UiLKANUUOfItUN
LANCASTER Dairying was
literally going to the dogs a little
over a century ago.
This quaint description doesn’t
have anything to do with the
financial status of the farming
economy at the time.
It has more to do with the
ingenuity of early farm families in
trying to relieve some of the
tedious drudgery that charac
terized then- daily lives.
And in these efforts, some
imaginative dairy farmers tned to
utilize the family dog.
Traditionally, one of the most
tedious tasks on a dairy farm of the
past was the churning of butter.
An early dairy wife described it
this way:
“If I had my choice of ironing the
week’s wash or churning butter for
market, 1 would be hard pressed to
make up my mind. Both occupy so
many of my waking hours that
they also haunt a good bit of my
sleeping hours.”
Another member of a dairy
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ingenuity churned out dairy farming
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family, who obviously had weary
arms from the churning, put it into
less kindly terms.
“Butter has to be the work of the
Devil. But he doesn’t need to worry
about making it since it won’t keep
down there."
It was statements such as these
that likely prompted a rash of
farm-bom inventions that ushered
in the dairying era of “dog power”
during the latter quarter of the 19th
Century.
While this epoch of pooch power
never really made any permanent
inroads into ag technology or even
lasted that long, it was a time of
unique early ingenuity delving into
the dilemma of dairy drudgery.
The accompanying drawing
shows one such effort to get the
Fidos of farming directly involved
in the making of butter.
This colossal, cumbersome and
complicated contrivance shows the
lengths that some dairy farm
families would go to get away from
churning.
And equally as ingenious as the
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mechanics of this dog wheel must
have been the efforts to keep the
dog in the proper spot and provide
the proper motivation to keep the
wheel moving.
Any present-day dairy farmers
interested in trying this method on
a much smaller scale might at
tempt rigging up such an ap
paratus to the wheel found in the
cage of the family’s pet hamster or
gerbil. Of course, a teaspoon of
cream would be about the
maximum capacity of a gerbil
powered wheel-chum.
Another similarly massive dog
power invention featured a round,
revolving platform set on its side
at an angle. The dog walked round
and round and the circular action
relayed the power through a
system of cogs, gears and walking
beam to an upright or rotary
chum.
But these attempts out of the
past to get around the chore of
churning were not limited to
putting the pooch to work. Some of
these wheels were equipped with
“motors” that were one-lamb or
one-goatpower in size.
Another dairy farmer devised a
foot treadle that was attached
through a network of levers to the
dasher handles in the churn
Thus, a tapping foot could turn
out the butter while busy hands
mended a shut or stitched a quilt
It’s even said that churnmg
contests were held during hoe
downs to get some extra use out of
the wildlj stomping feet.
Here, in southeastern Penn
sylvania some dairy farmers put
their barrel-shaped chums on
rockers Then, an active youngster
could be convinced that the chum
was really a rocking horse and
imaginary rides not only kept the
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tot occupied but sloshed out
another batch of butter.
One evening, a dairy farmer
watched the similar action of a
rocking chair and the rocking
chum The next day, each was
connected to the other by a system
of levers. Thus, rocking the baby to
sleep was combined with butter
churning.
When stationary gasoline
engines came into vogue about the
turn of the century, butter chur
ning finally became really
automated.
The most ingenious of the
churning innovators out of
dairying’s past was the farmer
who lashed a jug of cream to each
r,t Kic r»art or wawn He
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SKOAL PMCED MAM IMS
In Stock For Immediate Delivery
■ Attn. P.E. Hess
“ Box 337. Oxford. PA 19363
■ I'm interested in more information on Butter products
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inventions
claimed a butter production
capacity of better than a pound per
mile.
But due to the rough roads of the
day his idea never spread much
beyond his own stony, rutted lane
In fact, the idea was generally
spread over a good bit of the lane
These are but a few of the
technological tries of early dairy
farmers at improving the chore of
churning
A part of dairying’s colorful
past, they had their place in their
day as another small step in the
steady scientific advancement that
has t oved today's industry into
the era of computerized feeding
and embryo transfers
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