A home-made wooden two-wheeled cart has been added to the museum’s collection. It was used by Jesse and Cora (May) Locker on their farm a mile north of Salamonia until they quit milking. Twice a day, the Lockers milked five or six cows by hand and then poured the milk through a strainer, which removed any impurities, into ten-gallon milk cans. This cart, which held two cans, was used to haul the cans from the barn to a 100-gallon water tank near the house. Well water in the tank kept the milk cool until the milkman came to get the cans the next day.

The cans on the cart and the strainer which is shown on top of the back can belonged to Jesse and Cora’s old-est son Evere Locker and his wife Marceil (Thornton), who lived in Wayne Township. As with many farmers in the area, both Locker families sold their milk to the Fort Recovery Equity. Every farmer who sold milk was assigned a number which was axed to their cans to idenfy which farm the milk was from. When the cans reached the dairy, they were emped, sanized and returned to the same farm the next day. For most farmers, milking in the 1900s was much dier-ent than the huge mechanized and computerized dairy farms of today.