Cheese Factory

AIl summer they’d make cheese [at the factory in Orwell], and then, come late in the fall, they’d separate the milk and the butter. Do you know all they got for cheese in those days? Eleven cents.

There was different people in it. There was Billy Brown; he was there; he was a neighbour down there. He was there for years. And there was Henry MacDonald; Red Henry, we called him. He was a Cheese—maker too. He died here the other day, this Red Henry. He was 80. He had a son a priest.

They came from, oh, Little Sands or something — no, down this other way. I don’t know where he came from but he was an Islander anyway. And he was good. Eleven cents for cheese; and butter, about 25 cents.

I used to haul the milk, see, once in a while. Pick up the route; it was ten cents a hundred. You’d have to haul a ton to make two dollars, and you’d get home at dinnertime. That’s a lot of milk. Well, there wasn’t that many selling milk, so the average load...was ten hundred. Horses, truck wagon. Every day; you’d have to [go around] every day or the milk’d get sour.

They’d have a milk stand, and set the can out on the milk stand. I used to have to drive up here to Grandview to get the first can up there... , and turn around and come down. I think there was about four wagons went in there [to the factory]. There’d be five or six districts around.

Then you’d have to haul the whey back to the pigs. That was quite a job. You know what I mean? [You’d] put off your load of milk. Then you’d drive around the factory and you’d come through. After they separate the milk they’d get a whey out of it. That’s when you take the cream off and you take the good out of the milk. They’d take the cream out of it till there was nothing left, only this whey stuff.

Would take almost as much whey back as you had milk going. They’d be looking for that for their hogs. Give to their pigs, sure; they’d go mad for that stuff.

I only hauled about one or two years. There was nothing in it. A dollar was a dollar them days, but, by gee, that was the hard way.

Healthy Work

We used to dig [mussel] mud those times. You had a mud—digger out on the ice and a horse in the capstan. The horse’d go around the capstan and raise up the mud and dump it into your sleigh. Put it on the land instead of

a“ Jack Naddy 141