Two-hundred Milking stools - and counting

Jean Mehl with some of the 200 milk stools she has accumulated.

Just about the time you think you've heard of every possible item that might be of interest to a collector, you learn about something new. The world is full of stamp and coin collectors, of course, and while any number of people collect everything from paperweights to bottle caps, Jean Mehl has a collection like few others have: she collects old milking stools!

The Corn Belt Electric member, who lives near Stanford, has some 200 milking stools of various shapes and sizes.

Back when family farms produced a little of everything, Jean says, milking was largely done by hand. A farm might have corn as its main crop, and there'd be hogs for sale and for pork for the family. As likely as not, there'd be a flock of chickens for eggs and Sunday dinners. Cows provided milk for the family, as well as for sale to a nearby dairy. Of course, there were farms that specialized in milking dairy cows.

"Families might have had any number of cows," she says, "and they were partly limited by how many cows they could get milked by hand. Milking was often a family affair. Each person who milked cows often had his or her own milking stool, and it's surprising how many variations there were on such a simple thing."

Many milking stools were simple one-legged devices that just enabled the milker to keep balanced as they half-squatted next to the cow. Others had more legs, and the multi-legged stools almost always had three legs, rather than two, four or any other number.

Jean was at a farm sale, on the verge of buying a small lot of stuff. The auctioneer, eager to clinch a sale, kept tossing in bits and pieces "to sweeten the pot," as she puts it. "When he threw in the milking stool. I bought the lot."

But she didn't buy it to start a collection. In fact, she can't cite a specific reason that the casual addition of a simple wooden milking stool tipped the balance, prompting her to up her bid one more time.

"But I had one," she says, "and I got the one my husband, Harry, used when he was milking cows. I didn't know any better, so I painted it Prussian blue. I've since learned that painting them ruins the value, so I don't do that any more!"

Relatives gave her a couple more stools. With four, she had the basis for a collection, and finally got started in serious collecting. "It's gotten now to where friends and neighbors will look for them at farm sales for me," Jean says, "and my kids will give them to me as gifts, when they can find them."

"They're interesting," she says, "because it's amazing how many variations there are on a simple little device that's basically a T-shaped item."

"Some are just that," she adds, "and they're no more than two pieces of wood nailed together. But some have a brace on each side, while others are

6 ILLINOIS COUNTRY LIVING APRIL 1996

Tractor seats and old planks are among pieces that have gone into homemade milk stools.

braced both from side to side and from front to back. Others are more fancy. I have one that has a maple seat and the legs look like they're made of hickory. There are other examples, too. I have one that's made out of either a table leg or a porch post, I can't tell which. Some of the three-legged stools are smoothed and shaped, while others are still pretty basic."

Later on, more elaborate stools came into use, and they looked a bit like a cobbler's bench, with a little shelf that was designed to keep the milk pail up off the sloppy floor. Such stools were called "sanitary stools," she notes.

As time went by, sanitation became more important, and the federal government stepped in. Different kinds of milk were put into different classifications, and a dairyman who hoped to sell Grade A milk had to give up his wooden milking stool and get a metal one, which would be easier to keep clean.

'They started coming into use in about the 1920s," Jean says, "and a lot of companies started making them. I have two that were given to me by distant relatives who owned the Hohulin Fence Factory in Goodfield, Illinois. They made milking stools that were sold in the old Sears & Roebuck catalogs back in the 1920s and '30s. I have a 1929 catalog page that offered them for sale for 60 cents, postpaid."

But many farmers, faced with the prospect of having to get a metal stool and reluctant to cave in to raving extravagance, decided to build their own. "I have one that's made from the lid from a corn planter, which someone added angle iron legs to, and another was made from a Model T Ford brake drum. Still another was made from a milk can," Jean says, "and another interesting one was built from the top of an old wooden washing machine, with a flange from some piece of farm equipment, and a couple of other scraps."

The small farm was the backbone of American agriculture for decades, and nearly all had cows. Even some town people had small barns behind the house for a source of fresh milk. And nearly everyone had a milking stool, too. In addition to Illinois, Jean has found stools from Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington, as well as Canada and Mexico. "The one from Mexico is interesting," she relates, "because someone took a bent nail and decorated it with a brand of some kind. But when the farmer found out it was for a collection, he said it was too humble. He added a couple of braces that don't really fit, so it's not as desirable a collector's item as it might have been."

As she got a worthwhile collection going, Jean decided to take them to the State Fair in 1988. She wanted to enter them in the antiques category, but the judges didn't let her. "I set up a little display in the dairy barn," she says.

Since then, she has taken to displaying the stools at schools senior centers and at club meetings of one kind or another. "It's really enjoyable to show them to senior citizens' groups," she says, "because they always appreciate it so much. Most of them can remember milking cows. They all have a story to tell about milking stools and cows."

Even with some 200 milking stools, Jean is always in the market for more, and as world travelers, the Mehls hope to find some in future travels. "We've been to China and Pakistan," she says, "but the language barrier made things difficult. A lot of the milking is done by women, and they don't use stools. They just squat beside the cow. Even so, we hope to add to the collection when we visit our friends and relatives in Germany and Switzerland."

APRIL 1996 ILLINOIS COUNTRY LIVING 7