Cream Separators Paid: Antique Dairy Collectibles Example of Innovation on the Farm

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Kent Gordon surrounds himself with his favorite dairy collectibles, on permanent display in his home. "I have more than 40 separators in the house," he says. "It's kind of cramped, but we make do." Courtesy of Kent Gordon

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The motivation behind Kent Gordon’s collection of cream separators has nothing to do with the good old days, and everything to do with early technology.

“The mechanics of the cream separator really interest me,” he says, “the fact that something invented in 1878 could spin at 5,000 or 6,000 rpm. To turn that fast, the separator really had to be perfectly balanced. It’d be a real feat to build that, to get the gearing and balance all just right.”

Kent grew up on a farm but it was not a dairy operation. “There wasn’t a cream separator on the place,” he says. After college, he worked for International Harvester. While helping conduct a dealership inventory in the early 1970s, he saw an IHC 3S cream separator, still in the crate, tucked into a dark corner.

“It had never been sold, and at that point, International had been out of the separator business for 20 years,” he says. He wanted it, but the dealer held on to it. Kent walked away telling himself, “one of these days I’m going to own one of those.”

About 10 years later, he dropped in on First Monday Trades Day, a huge swap meet in Canton, Texas, determined to buy an IH separator. The first thing he saw was a DeLaval separator; he bought it. Continuing through the swap meet, he saw a Montgomery Ward table-top model. “I bought it,” he says. Finally he stumbled on to an International separator. “So I bought it too,” he admits. “I bought three separators on the same day!”

Thirty years later, his collection numbers in the hundreds. “Separators are just kind of neat,” he says. “When I started collecting, they were cheap. I didn’t have space for, say, 500 tractors, and I couldn’t afford 500 tractors, but I could make room for 500 separators.”

Evolving technology

In the 1800s, cream was a valuable commodity used in butter production. Early methods of separating cream from milk were slow, inefficient and often resulted in spoilage. Basically, milk was poured into pans or containers, allowed to sit for a day or two, and then hand-skimmed to remove cream. Later methods such as immersion of tall cans in tanks of cold water (gravity separators) and dilution (accelerating the separation process by adding water to milk) were only marginal improvements.

Implementation of centrifugal separation in the 1870s was a major step forward, allowing much more efficient processing. Raw milk is poured down through the center of the spinning separator bowl, which acts as a centrifuge. Cream – which is lighter than skim milk – rises through the top spout. The heavier skim milk is hurled to the far surfaces of the bowl’s interior and exits through a lower spout. “By the late 1800s, centrifuges were used for pharmaceuticals and in brewing,” Kent says. “Basically, any time they wanted to separate solids from liquids, they used a centrifuge.”

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