This rather severe-looking cinderblock building is the National Condensed Milk Company or, as it's known in nearly every post card caption I've seen, simply the milk condensory (okay, it's 'condensing factory' in this photo). I think it was still making powdered milk when I moved out of town, almost seventy years after it was built in 1910.
What seems truly stunning to me about the milk condensory is the number of times it was the subject of post card photos. From what I can tell, every time a photographer passed through town, he snapped a picture of the bridge, the main street, and the milk condensory. This is remarkable to me because it wasn't exactly what I'd call the most photogenic building in town. I would strongly suspect its designer belonged to a Soviet school of architecture, if there'd been such a thing in 1910, but there wasn't, so the only thing I can figure is he must've just been a very practical, and very bored draftsman.
The top photo reaches for an amazing amount of drama by seemingly depicting the milk condensory high atop a towering hill, upon which its hard-edged prison-like face glares down on every other building in town. In fact, the condensory is at the bottom of the north end of Bridge Street, almost in the Little Wolf river, as you can clearly see in one of the photos below.
Page maintained by Dave Okonski :: last update 8 March 2004