54 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



business is to deliver 80,000 pounds of milk received from about 

 250 farms daily, various milk products such as condensed, homo- 

 genized milk, cheese, and skim-milk soap are made in this estab- 

 lishment. 



Americans would be very much impressed with the lack of 

 what we call modern machinery for handling milk. The milk 

 is pasteurized in large sterilizing vats located on the third floor 

 of the building. These were heated by a jacket of hot water, 

 and the milk is stirred by a paddle shaped stirrer which moves 

 back and forth during the heating. Milk flows from these tanks 

 through pipes to the floors below where it is drawn into bottles 

 or cans which are taken on the delivery wagons for distributing 

 milk to customers. 



The milk bottles are tall, rather narrow, oval shaped 

 instead of cylindrical. They have a narrow neck into which a 

 paper cap is placed by means of a machine which seems to work 

 in a satisfactory way. The bottle washing machine requires 

 much more hand labor than modern machines of this kind used 

 in America. The bottles are slipped over pegs like the spokes of 

 a large wheel which revolves in a tank of water. These must 

 be put on and taken off by a man standing in front of the wheel 

 and handling the bottles one by one. A stream of hot and cold 

 water is forced into each bottle through the pegs. 



The retail milk delivery wagons are rather large and resem- 

 ble a sheet iron box on wheels. The driver rides on top of the 

 box and two or more boys have seats which hang from an 

 arrangement like the rear steps which we often see on an Ameri- 

 can omnibus. The iron box is fielled with tall rectangular boxes 

 each having a faucet at the side from which the boys draw milk 

 and deliver from house to house in small cans. Sixty of these 

 milk wagons are now in use and each one of them usually makes 

 two trips per day. 



It is quite common for the milkman in Germany to have 

 more than one kind of milk on his wagon : first, mixed full milk 

 from the common supply of the creamery which sells for about 



