IHC McCormick Cream Separator - Townsend, MT
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T0SHEA
N 46° 19.321 W 111° 30.940
12T E 460302 N 5129956
Established in a brand new, purpose built edifice, the Broadwater County Museum was officially dedicated on July 4, 1976.
Waymark Code: WM17GVN
Location: Montana, United States
Date Posted: 02/19/2023
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Owned and operated by the Broadwater County Historical Society, which held its first meeting on August 21, 1970, the society worked for two years toward opening the Broadwater County Museum. Construction began in April 1974 and, though not yet open to the public, the society held its first annual meeting to take place in the completed building a year later. Continuing to expand thereafter, work on a new addition to the museum was completed in 2000. Featured within the new addition are a "half-scale model of a dugout canoe of the type Lewis & Clark and the Corps of Discovery built on their voyage along the upper Missouri. Also featured are an authentic sheep herders wagon, a horse drawn carriage and a buffalo skin."
The Museum features an extensive historical library, The Eleanor Marks Library. Included in the library are copies of most of the local newspapers, dating back to the 1800s. The library also has extensive records of obituaries of local residents and the location of their burial, as well as links to comprehensive information on the cemeteries and burial sites in Broadwater County.
Within the museum are a wealth of artefacts relating to the story of the people of Broadwater County, including domestic life, business life, agricultural life and cultural life. Of interest to many who visit the Museum are the Family History files, which contain histories of many local families, both past and present.
In the Homemaking section of the museum is a quite complete collection of utensils, containers and appliances which would have been found in the well appointed kitchen of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. This particular item, however, would seldom, if ever, be found in the kitchen. Instead, it would much more likely be found in the barn, a garage, on a porch or veranda, or any other outbuilding found on a farm. In my case, the separator lived its entire life in the pump house, just 60 or 80 feet from the barn in which the milking was accomplished. As a youngster, I grew up eating my Corn Flakes topped with cream so thick it had to be spooned into the bowl! 😊
Standing in a corner of the museum beside a General Elactric Monitor Top refrigerator is this cream separator, bearing McCormick Deering branding. While most cream separators one encounters in museums are manually powered, sporting a large crank and enclosed flywheel on one side, this is an electrically operated model, hence likely of later vintage. A wild guess would put its year of manufacture in the 1940s or '50s. Up until the era of this model, separators included swing-out steel platforms for the milk and cream pails, which this unit does not. In front stands a 5 gallon cream can, the type used to transport the separated cream to a creamery where the cream becomes myriad other delicious and fattening edibles such as butter or ice cream.
Sadly, we have no model or serial numbers, so extensive information may not be forthcoming. A net search, however, reveals that this is almost certainly a McCormick Deering Model 3-F, capable of separating 750 pounds of milk per hour, year of manufacture still unknown.
International Harvester was a large tractor and farm implement manufacturer who merged with the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company and the Deering Harvester Company in the early 1900s. They kept the McCormick, Deering and McCormick Deering brands for many years, until finally everything was manufactured under just the International Harvester name, then just International.