Behind the Beall-Dawson House is the last remaining original outbuilding, affectionately (?) known as the Dairy House. Its purpose is storage: today, for miscellaneous supplies and large (and relatively impervious) artifacts, and in the past as a kind of large outdoor pantry. The photo at left shows the Dairy in 1952, when the House was owned by the Davis family.
Yesterday, our intrepid GWU interns helped me tackle the Dairy House, which needed an inventory and, since it’s not entirely enclosed, a good sweeping. Few people get to see the inside of our little outbuilding, so I thought I’d take a slightly different direction on the blog, and put up some photos!
The typical dairy house is built partly underground, the better to keep things cold. (Here’s an example from another Dawson house, from the HABS photo collection.) It would be more accurate to call our building a “spring house,” but somehow “dairy” stuck. The first floor is on ground level; there’s a plaster-on-brick trough built along the back (north) wall, through which our parking-lot-puddle-creating underground spring was fed thanks to a now-vanished windmill. The flowing spring water helped keep perishable items cool. Today, the spring stays underground and we avoid putting anything perishable in here. This photo shows a foot-powered grindstone (donated by Jean Fisher) standing in the old water trough. (I hope a photo appears here. WordPress is objecting to all versions of this image, I’m not sure why.) [click here to see it.]
The second floor, reached by both an exterior door and a ladder leading to a hole in the floor, was probably just regular old storage, as it is today. Shown here are a gigantic pair of blacksmith’s bellows – don’t ask me how they got them up there (it was long before my time) – and, in the foreground, a wooden bell wheel from the old St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rockville.
As far as we know, the Dairy House is as old as the House itself (ca. 1815). The building is brick, plastered inside, with a gable roof; its footprint is 10′ x 12′, sitting 32′ from the back wall of the House. It appears on early 20th century fire insurance maps (labeled in 1908 as a “Dairy,” perhaps contributing to its modern name), but is not specifically mentioned on anything earlier. The upstairs door, cedar roof, and interior floors (wood upstairs, concrete downstairs) were replaced by the Davis family in the 1940s, and the barred windows and main door were installed about 20 years ago.
So there you go – a little sneak peek at our often-overlooked outbuilding. Give it a Hello next time you visit!
A Fine Collection 
July 11, 2012 at 1:53 pm
Hi Joanna!
The link to the HABS photo doesn’t want to work… and the photo of the 1st floor of the dairy house doesn’t appear. Just a heads up. Otherwise, I love this post. Even after all my years at MCHS, I had never seen the inside of the diary house until now!
Beth
July 11, 2012 at 2:21 pm
Argh! I’ll try and do a photo-and-link update tomorrow, maybe it will be in a better mood.
July 11, 2012 at 7:06 pm
The link to the HABS photo worked for me. But the 1st floor photo is still missing. Either way, it’s nice to read about the little dairy house, and if the photos don’t want to be here you can post some on the MCHS Facebook page!
July 13, 2012 at 8:14 am
I was curious about why this outbuilding was referred to as “The Dairy House,” and now I have my explanation.
July 13, 2012 at 9:06 am
[…] Or at least a step further than it got on Wednesday! So here is the photo that wouldn’t work before: the plaster-on-brick trough that runs along the north wall of the Dairy House. (The […]
July 18, 2012 at 10:09 am
[…] Last week I linked to a picture of a Montgomery County dairy house, but didn’t really explain it. Before refrigerators, you had to find other ways to preserve your food for any length of time; keeping ice on hand throughout the year was helpful. Once a body of water (often a deliberately-made ”ice pond”) was sufficiently frozen in the winter, horse-drawn ice-scorers or plows marked the surface into blocks, which were then cut out with saws. A variety of tools (such as this ice hook from Rockville) were used to transport the heavy blocks to an ice house, designed to keep the blocks frozen throughout the summer. Like dairy houses, ice houses were dug into the ground to keep the temperature low; the double-thick walls were often filled with sawdust for further insulation, and the blocks themselves were packed in sawdust or straw. When you wanted some ice for drinks or to make ice cream, you wouldn’t pull out a whole block; ice picks, chisels, hatchets and shavers were used to get just what you needed. […]
April 24, 2013 at 3:47 pm
[…] intern projects? (Who wouldn’t?) We’ve featured them in these posts: Log cabin toy, A peek inside the dairy house, 1912 and 1924 diaries, a compendium of summer projects, and one guest blog. Take a moment to […]