By
Matthew Shoen
When I was in elementary school the administrators took the soda machine by the cafeteria and replaced it with a milk machine. Back home milk was big and the milk machine was
supposed to encouraging us to drink healthier (It failed, everyone drank the
chocolate and strawberry milk). Yet more than encourage us to get our daily
calcium, the milk machine was a reminder of our community’s bonded ties to the
dairy industry. In the 1880s St. Lawrence County led the state in milk production with almost nine million gallons a year. Lisbon had more cows than people, by a significant margin. As a
kid, my father milked five hundred head for a neighbor, by the time my
brother started milking that same neighbors farm was three thousand head and
struggling to survive due to how badly milk prices have bottomed out in the
last few decades.
When I moved to Buffalo to start working with Preservation
Studios I had milk on the brain. My brother had only just quit milking because
his employer had him working eleven-hour shifts without a lunch break. I hadn’t
expected to learn about milk in Buffalo. Frankly, after my brother’s issues I was
done with the stuff. Yet when we started working on the milk depot of Queen
City Dairy at 885 Niagara Street I found the building’s story and by extension
the story of milk in the early twentieth century fascinating. That story, and
how it intersects with science and social history is worth digging into.
The milk depot as a building type really only occurred in
America between 1880 and 1930. This critical fifty-year span featured a massive
transformation in both city life, and technology that majorly impacted the way
milk was consumed. Prior to 1880 there were very few metropolises in America
and many people living on the edge of large cities had barns and livestock from
which they drew milk for sale to people living in the city center. The time
between utter and human lips was minimal and this rendered milk generally safe
(minus the very real potential of bovine tuberculosis). The great waves of
migration that characterized the 1880s and beyond changed the urban
environment however. Suddenly it was illegal to have livestock inside city limits and
milk production became a completely rural affair after these ordinances were passed. A new building type became
necessary, a place where milk could be accumulated and then distributed to
neighborhoods as dawn broke. The milk
depot was created to fill this roll.
The milkman coming with his cart and bottles of
fresh creamy milk is an iconic image of the era, a symbol of simpler times and
quaint Americanism. Unfortunately this imagery is a whitewash of the truth.
Though milk from Queen City Dairy came to the doorsteps of many houses in
Buffalo it did not come as the rich healthy substance we know today.
As I said, the era of the milk depot was an era of massive
change. Unfortunately, effective refrigeration was not one of those changes. In Buffalo,
the milk gathered in the bulk tanks of Queen City Dairy came from as far away
as Elma and Mt. Morris. This milk sat in twenty gallon metal jugs, waiting for
a train to pick it up and bring it into the city. As you can guess this did
nothing for the favor of Buffalo’s milk. Even ignoring the dangerous bacteria
cultures, milk of this era “contained clods of dirt and had a barny flavor…Some
bacteria gave milk a slimy consistency, increasing its viscosity so
dramatically that it could be pulled into strings. Other bacteria colored it
blue, green, or red.”[1]
Perhaps bacteria are an explanation for the blue milk in Star Wars and why Luke was so eager to get off Tatooine.
Because of the ordinances that outlawed keeping dairy cows within city limits the time milk spent traveling from the farm to consumer was dramatically increased, something that the
creation of milk depots reflects. The milk depot as a space was necessary to
concentrate milk for distribution, something a single farmer out in Elma could not do
profitably. As the nineteenth century ended, the milk depot also became
responsible for a new important function, purifying milk for consumption.
Because milk took so long to reach consumers people
died by the millions from drinking it. With its mix of sugars and fats milk
can grow a terrifying variety of bacterial cultures. Now compound that with 20th
century ideas about the superiority of cows milk to human milk. During the
decades when milk was easily one of the most dangerous substances in the world, people believed that breastfeeding was savage and too taxing for the modern woman's nerves. The industrialized world overwhelmed the female constitution in such a way that breastfeeding would be too much
exertion for a new mother. While we can laugh at how nonsensical this idea was we
cannot laugh at its effect. Infant mortality rates during this time ran between
15% and 25%. Babies were fed liquid diphtheria and typhoid to keep them from
the over-stressed breasts of their mothers. Deaths were especially common
during the summer months when milk sat in rail yards in sweltering heat,
breeding bacteria.
Pasteurization began to alter this fatal relationship, and
Queen City Dairy was one of the first pasteurizing milk depots in Buffalo. Pasteurization was first promoted in wine as
a way to prevent the wine rack from becoming a vinegar rack. A German agricultural
chemist named Franz von Soxhlet first proposed pasteurizing milk as a method to
reduce infant mortality rates, a proposal which was viciously contested. Many depots
lacked the cash to upgrade their facilities to pasteurize and some scientists
believed that pasteurizing milk destroyed its nutritional value, an argument
you can still see being made to this day by a small vocal minority (milk
libertarians?). Still milk interests, such as Queen City Dairy, who could afford
to pasteurize began to promote their facilities as purveyors of clean wholesome
milk. Pasteurization became a marketing strategy for Queen City Dairy and
depots like it, and as a byproduct, the mortality rate of America’s babies began
to fall.
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| A bit creepy, but nonetheless effective for its day. |
Milk was finally made safe after the 1930s when refrigerated
trucks and a more even application of pasteurization helped eradicate much of
the disease milk historically contained. By then Queen City Dairy had gone out
of business and soon after the entire milk depot industry went under as the
supermarket began to displace milk deliveries as the medium through which
people got their daily calcium.
For a brief fifty years the history of milk intertwined in
terrifying ways with the society and technology. Milk was the deadliest
substance in America and every doctor prescribed it for newborns. Taken from dirty tubercular udders and placed on rail spurs for hours on end in the hot sun, milk
little resembled the substance we drink today. People drank milk and died
unaware that they’d taken a sip of death with their evening meal. The milkman making his rounds each dawn
carried a cartful of disease and it was not until pasteurization and later on
refrigeration that the danger of milk passed and people could enjoy milk without the fear of feeding tubercular death to their children. So, if you drive by the old milk depot at 885 Niagara Street slow down and take a moment to think about what happened within its walls. This building, like most of Buffalo's buildings, tells a fascinating story, a sad story no doubt, but a story of our ancestors and how they lived and died, drinking milk.
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| The Queen City Milk Depot |
[1]
Kendra Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern
Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 12.
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