When I was 20, my high school friend moved to a small town to study agriculture. I sometimes visited her and spotted a really nice looking, cute, pink, yet definitely abandoned dairy plant. Its doors were sometimes open, but for some reason or another I never stopped to have a closer look.
That was 12 years earlier. Now I’ve come to have a second look.
The place was as I remembered it, although now in a much worse condition. I have no clue, when it was abandoned. The co-operative running the plant was merged in 1990 with a larger dairy co-operative. It was however dissolved only in 2007.
Judging by the age of the machinery, milk hasn’t been produced here in decades. The plant was still active in 1989, so the date of closure must be between 1989 and 2007, probably earlier than later.
A classic thing found in all abandoned places: cigarette packs and candy wraps.
What is this? The love child of a typewriter and calculator?
This area is probably where the raw milk has been received and processed milk sent to customers. The loading dock, through which I entered, is to the right.
The tiles in the floor have come loose.
“Love eachother”. This is an important message.
A look towards the entrance. The sofas have not been a part of the original furniture.
The boiler room. The plant had its own small power station and a tall brick chimney. The chimney was demolished in 2017, when its condition deteriorated so much it posed a hazard for people passing by.
Nowadays the boiler room was just a mess.
Peeling paint and all sorts of canisters.
Another canister belonging to a company in Turku. The funny thing here is, that that company manufactured ladies’ underwear. What its canister was doing at a dairy plant hundreds of kilometers away remains a complete mystery.
A really vintage bag of corn flakes.
Oil barrels. Although I believe that the building has had oil heating at some point (if not still), that oil is usually pumped directly into oil tanks. Maybe this oil has been used for lubricating machinery.
I sincerely hope that there is no longer oil in these. They are in a very bad shape.
More random mess.
It actually looks that the boiler was powered with coal or firewood. Maybe it was later modernized to burn oil, as burning something else would have meant that somebody was needed to feed the fire, and this wasn’t very efficient.
A corner with very old pipes and the main switchboard.
And this is just the beginning.