H. P. Hood Creamery

In 1907 the H. P. Hood Company, a Boston-area milk distributor since 1846, leased a parcel of land adjacent to the St. Johnsbury and Lamoille County Railroad from Edward F. Branon, whose store, grain business, and farm surrounded the rail crossing. The company built this wood-frame, two-story, hipped-roof creamery, a late example of a type found in most railway farm towns in the state. Almost immediately, the Hood Creamery began accepting cream and milk from nearly two hundred farms, producing butter, twenty-five-pound cheeses, and casein, and employing eight men in summer and five in winter. In 1910 it began daily fluid milk shipments to Boston. The cheese room and refrigerated milk and cream storage tanks occupied the building's first floor with offices on the second. In 1932, the plant began shipping milk exclusively, soon becoming the most prolific Hood receiving station in New England with fifty thousand pounds of milk passing through annually. As farm-based bulk tanks and tanker trucks became the norm in dairying, the plant closed in 1961, although it still had one hundred patrons and was shipping one hundred thousand pounds of milk per year. The property reverted to the Branon family, which converted the building to a large sugarhouse for processing sap from the farm's extensive maple woods.