The Elusive Brick-Faced Milk House

Usually when we drive to north Everett, we head down Broadway Ave. from our house here in Clearview, and then on to the Lowell-Larimer Road. 

 I love this drive, with the large dairies and small farms aligning the roadside.  The Snohomish River delta began to be settled in the 1870s. E.D. Smith, a former sea captain and entrepreneur, platted and resold lots to incoming settlers who wanted to farm the flat lands to the south. These farming families included the Getchels, Stechers, Cravens, and Larimers.

Dairy farming as a small business or industry came to the Lowell area in the early part

 of the twentieth century.

  About a month ago, my Mom let me borrow a book called The Barns & Outbuildings of the Lowell Neighborhood. Knowing how interested I am in the history of the area, she thought I would appreciate it.

 I keep it in my car, and whenever we take this route, I try to identify some of the old barns along the way.

On this particular day, Mount Baker was looking quite majestic!

This is Larimer Corner -
 I'm not sure what this building once was, but it may have been the Larimer Corner Store.

One of the old buildings in the book which really fascinated me was the Brick-Faced Milk House, in front of the Stecher Farm.  I've driven by this little gem of a building hundreds of times, but never paid it much mind until I saw it in this book. It looks so quaint and interesting in the drawing...

In reality, it's been sorely neglected. I feel sad because this beautiful little building has so much junk piled up around it. If I owned this pretty little place, I would plant hollyhocks around it, and surely store my trash cans elsewhere!

Through the 1930s and 1940s the Stecher Dairy competed with the emerging big business aspect of the dairy industry. They processed and distributed their own milk with small fleets of trucks and a local distribution network.

 Originally built of wood several years earlier, the milk house was faced with bricks in 1934. At the same time, brick was applied to the nearby farmhouse, which was built in 1903.Caspar Bast, Everett's first brick mason, did the work.

The Bast family built many of the early permanent structures in Everett with Bast brick. In June 1892, they completed their own business building, the Bast Block at Hewitt and Maple, which still stands and is occupied by Judd and Black.

They supplied brick for other substantial structures, including the Everett Smelter and the first schools, Monroe and Jefferson Elementary, completed in 1893.

But back to the milk house - 

 The building measures thirteen by nine feet on the outside, although it looks much smaller than that. The walls, which are white-washed on the inside, at least they still were when the little book was written, are eight inches thick. In this well-insulated room, the milk from five or six cows was kept cool inside large metal cans, which sat in a cement cooler shaped similar to a bathtub where cold spring water flowed. The milk was then put in sterilized glass bottles, and topped with paper caps for delivery.

Our family used to journey out to one of these dairies in the 1950s to buy milk - could it possibly have been this one? I'll have to ask my mom - she still remembers most of those little details from the past.

On our next journey down the Lowell-Larimer Road, I plan on taking more photos of some of the old barns that still exist. They all have a story!