This building was located near the east side of Worcester Rd., a two-lane highway across from our house. It was built in the shape of a “T”, the top of which faced the road, and the stem forming the main part of the barn being 100 feet deep. The stem housed stalls for four horses to the left as you entered the barn, then came a milk cooling room, and then two bays for hay that ran from the cellar level to the roof: this held a lot of hay. The main floor ran the full length of the barn, with a cattle tie up area [called a linter]) with haylofts over the cattle, the main floor, and the horses. There was a grain room just to the left, as you entered the main doors. The Linter to the right housed about 20 head of cattle tied up with a chain around their necks. The chain had a large ring that slid up and down a strong wood post. Every two cows had a water trough, with a place to put their grain or whatever was to be their meal. Behind the cows there was an aisle with scuttles to provide a place to dispose of the manure, which would pile up in the cellar below. This was cleaned in the spring by shoveling the manure into horse drawn manure spreader and then taking it to one of the fields, where it would be spread by the machine onto the ground to fertilize the land. Also on the right side of the linter there was large room that was divided into two parts, one larger than the other. The larger part was often used to hold a sick cow or one that was about give birth. The smaller pen was used to hold young calves, unless the larger space was available. At one time we had two bull calves that we were trying to train to a yoke as a team. That was quite an experience for me as we would yoke the unruly ones up to the yoke and then tie their tails together. I would try to lead them out into the field, hoping to get them accustomed to each other and the yoke. I don’t ever remember completing this training. I think Dad died about then and the family lost the farm and had to eventually move out.
The right side of the “T” contained another linter that held another string of cows. They were hitched up in the same manner as above, but this section had no cellar under it for the manure. For a while the manure was shoveled out of a sliding wooden door into the barnyard. Finally, the milk inspectors required dad to put in manure carrier that was suspended on a track hung from the ceiling. This carrier was filled with the manure and pushed along the track into pit at the end of that linter where it would be dumped. When the pit got filled, it too would be emptied and spread on the fields. Sometime on a warm winter day, they would hitch up the team to a tipcart and shovel the stuff into it and take it to a field or garden and dump it into piles to be spread at a later time.
I mentioned the team of horses. The real working team was almost white and made up of a horse, Jim, and a mare, Kate. These were used for the heavy work on the farm. The other team was used to do light work, they were a black horse named Dolly and a brown horse, whose name I can’t remember. Dolly was used the most, and she was hitched to a hay rake for raking hay. A soon as I could handle her, I did most of raking.
Next to the calving pen there was the water tank room into which was placed the air compressor that was needed to provide the vacuum for the two milking machines that we used to do the milking. Up high in the tank room was the big water tank that supplied water by gravity to the cattle and the horse troughs. This tank was kept filled by the same one cylinder engine that pumped water to the house in the summer, pumping the water from a cistern in the brook. Any time water was needed to fill any one of these tanks, Dad had to go to the pump-house, open and close the appropriate valves, and crank start the engine, which at times could be pretty cantankerous, then he had to make sure to shut it off before the tank would get too full.