I was driving along a rural road, when I spotted something interesting along the way in a very small village.
Once again the building screamed abandonment. The text on the wall indicated, that it was a former dairy processing plant.
Actually I wasn’t too sure, if the place was abandoned or not. The bushes indicated, that it was, but the windows were just a bit too intact for what I was used to.
I tried to do a walkaround, but there was just too much stuff growing everywhere for that. I took a quick break and consulted Google to see what I was faced with.
The dairy plant opened in 1907 in a brand new wooden building. It grew so much, that in 1927 this new building was completed on the opposite side of the road. The opening was a big event with 500 attendees, a marching band and golden rings awarded to the builders.
In the early 1960’s the plant was modernized with a new floor and improvements like fridges and electric stoves being bought to the workers’ apartments upstairs. Even a central heating system was built.
But its time was running out. The plant was small and in a remote location. There was so much overproduction of milk in the country that the government offered money to farmers for killing their cows. The co-operative running the plant started merger negotiations with local competition in the 1960’s and finally reached an agreement with a larger company. They stopped manufacturing butter in 1970 and the end to the dairy plant’s activities came in 1971.
It looks like the place then became some sort of a workshop, but it has been abandoned for a very long time now.
The text above the door states: ‘When handling chemical containers, take extra care’.
It looked somewhat like a renovation had started. There were several stoves and radiators stored here.
The downstairs was a strange maze.
Some strange machinery.
The layout of the building was pretty irregular. The roof belongs to something, which looked like a cowshed – not very surprising to find in the backyard of a dairy plant.
That item looks like a sunroof. And seems extremely lost here.
Like I said, the place looked a bit like renovations had been started. That’s a stack of brand new roof bricks.
But otherwise it was just a mess.
A look back towards the area I first entered through.
And this is why I think the place had served as a workshop. There are oil and coolant stickers on the door as well as an old sticker promoting 5-speed Renault vans.
There was a lot of sawdust and insulation wool here. And some basic wooden constructions.
There were also some pretty strange tehcnical solutions here. Apparently there was a basement, I just couldn’t find an entrance there. And even if I had found one, I wouldn’t have entered it. You should know it by now.
Another storage room with old stoves. And a small glimpse of my shiny summer car in the window.
And with that we leave downstairs. Get ready for the upstairs.