Sometime back, I wrote about butter workers and churns. Well, now, what do you do with the product after it is washed and salted to taste?
There are several options. One can simply put it into a small crock and use it that way, or it can be kept fresher longer in a spring house, a well casing or a dugout basement where it can be kept cool. If you were real fortunate and lived close to an ice house, you might have an icebox.
Butter molds were another way of putting butter into manageable amounts that could be stored or sold. Some were fancy; others were mostly utilitarian as witnessed in these photos.
The large round unit was a gift from an antique store owner in Norfolk, Nebraska. It had belonged to his aunt and likely came from her mother. The rectangular wood mold is simply crude, showing evidence of having been used hard and washed often.
The large mold with a piano-type hinge is very smooth inside. I have no idea how this was used, as it would hold a fair amount of butter. The small mold, with decorations similar to those in the larger round one, may have been used to put a dollop of butter by each plate. The aluminum mold, of fairly recent origin, looks to be much easier to clean and hence more useful.
Molds (or prints) are simple to use. Butter is worked in with a paddle, then pushed out and stored in a cool place. We salvaged an icebox from a dirt-floor basement. Joan and I were working on a water system in a house owned by an older couple. These folks paid us off in old pieces, including a couple of rooster windmill weights from an Elgin Hummer windmill.
Butter boxes are remnants of the era when small creameries existed in many towns. Buffalo Ridge was in Ruthton, Minnesota. Cloverleaf was in Beresford, 60 miles down I-29 south of us. Dell Rapids, our town, had one as well. Sunnyside Dairy was run by Clarence Reuschlien, who learned the butter and cheesemaking trade in Wisconsin (and who even won an award at a fair for his cheese). Coming to South Dakota, Clarence helped get the first creamery in the state started at Ethan. The Dell Rapids creamery hired him to run one here in the 1950s. It was later sold to Terrace Park Dairy, a large outfit in Sioux Falls.
Closer to home but still out in the country 5 miles west of Jasper, Minnesota, Highland Creamery was established by a group of Norwegian farmers in the late 1890s. It lasted until 1916. These folks even had a steam boiler and engine to run the churn and employed Peter Peterson as a butter maker. Peter often wore wooden shoes as well as high boots when making butter, which was then a messy process.
Processed butter was put into 50-lb. tubs (which cost about 23 cents each), hauled to the railway in Jasper and shipped to Chicago or New York, depending on demand. The building itself was two stories with three rooms on the first floor and two above. Another facet of the operation was an ice house which involved cutting blocks of ice from a creek and packing them in a building with flax straw for insulation, thus being able to sell them in the summer as well.
Ice may have been used in the butter-making process as well, to keep the cream at the best temperature for butter-making.
Jeff Johnson, who lives one-half mile from the site, helped me with this information for this article, and I also relied on the Jasper centennial book. So it goes. FC
Jim and Joan Lacey operate Little Village Farm, a museum of farm collectibles housed in 10 buildings at their home near Dell Rapids, S.D. Contact them at (605) 428-5979.
