A Janson Wedding!

When this lovely bride was born, she was the first female Janson since Loretta, over 70 years earlier...and yesterday, she was married, at St Michaels Church in Buckman.  It was a lovely ceremony, and as one of the con-celebrants said, it was way better than selling sweet corn...☺

(BTW, I'm not mentioning names because most people prefer not to be google-able.  If you're related, you already know these people, right?)
Congratulations, K & G!!

Which came first--the creamery or the large herd?

There's a booklet published online at Archive.org called the  Official state creamery and cheese factory directory and dairy map of Minnesota, from 1898.  That year, Morrison county had only THREE creameries.  The closest one to Buckman was in Royalton, 17 miles away, an impractical distance to haul milk two or three times a week.


They didn't call it "economies of scale" back then, but you couldn't have a large herd of cows if you had no convenient market for the milk.  At the same time,  there was no need for a creamery if no farmer had surplus milk to sell.  

The Janson farm, for instance: the first years after Joseph and Franziska arrived (1883) in Buckman  were spent grubbing trees, clearing crop land, and building, as well as picking rocks in those fields and fencing pasture land for the horses and one or two cows.  They were subsisting.  Did they have produce to sell?  I don't know.  They moved to Virginia in 1900, and maybe the creamery was built by the time they returned.  Anton took over, and bought Jersey cows because they were small, gentle, and the milk was high in butter-fat, which sorta points to being a  member of the new Buckman Creamery.  His son (my uncle) Reinhard certainly was, as he milked a large herd of Holsteins.

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In the 1915  "History of Morrison and Todd counties",  John Schmolke's bio says he "has built five creameries and cream stations in this locality to establish a market for the cream.  They are located at Buckman, Ramey, Lastrup, Agram and New Pierz".  


It's possible you want to know more about how creameries were run.  Try this booklet, also on Archive.org:   Marketing practices of Wisconsin and Minnesota creameries, from 1918.  


It's a thriller!

TG for photo editing programs!

The original of this photo is 3 X 4 inches, and faded to sepia already.  It's too small to see much detail, but that's definitely Mom and her brother Reinhard on the left.

It's one of those family pics that just makes me smile.  Mom's informal, slightly pigeon-toed stance, and the third friend leaning into the group--and they were laughing...but you really can't see faces much.  So, scanning, darkening and enlarging it gives us a WAY better view:

I'd guess it was taken the winter following the 1939 California trip, since mom's holding the Camera, and the woman on the right looks like Marjorie Albright, her friend from the cities.

Looks like they're about to go skating...there's no snow on the skates, their mittens or knees.  Was Reinhard the driver, or did he just go along to kibbitz?

I don't recognize the place.  It could have been in Minneapolis, rather than Buckman, and Rhiney was visiting, so he didn't have his skates along. 

(I love imagining the set-up for a photo--the fifth person here, the photographer, said "Wait! Let's get a picture now before we're all too cold to stand still!")