Letter From Back East: Mt. Ararat Farms

Note: A friend of mine's blog inspired this one, so I thought, with his permission, I'd run a few of his better posts.


Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 locomotive

(Falmanac) I haven't been to Mount Ararat Farms in 37 years, but passing the sign always brings a smile to my face. My only visit to the place was during a field trip in the first grade.
The first grade was the high point of my education and it was all downhill from there. My teacher was literally "old school," born around 1904, she was close to retirement and had no use for modern education. She eschewed the latest teaching materials, preferring to read to us from "Robinson Crusoe" & the such. And she never, ever, talked down to us - the last of her kind in my school district.
One day we all loaded into the school bus and headed out for a field-trip. We went to the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant, the Conowingo hydroelectric dam, and to Mt. Ararat Farms Dairy. My two most distinct memories of the trip were riding through Port Deposit, and the dairy.
Port Deposit [Maryland] was like no other place I'd ever seen before, it was old, not like the suburbs at all. It had railroad tracks too - with a real live train going by, pulled by a big old black GG1 throwing showers of sparks off the catenary - and the Susquehanna, my first large river.
I remember the dairy because they gave us all milk; it was in some kind of new packaging that never caught on, bags, or triangles, or something.
Today all those things have been denounced. I can see why people don't like nuclear power plants, or hydroelectric dams, but the milk thing has me baffled. Indeed, after tasting the latest crop of margarines, I have (gasp!) gone back to butter. Salted, sweet cream, butter. They say it's bad for me, but all that artificial stuff, margarine, aspartame, children's literature, has always left a bad taste in my mouth.