Back in the old days, a group of farmers often went together to finance common facilities. In the case of saw mills and flour mills, the investments could then be shared and in some cases, they were also turned into profit making units, performing external tasks.
During the fundamental structural changes during the 1950s and 60s, most of these units passed away as centralized mega-plants made them obsolete. The buildings were typically converted for other purposes and the machinery either sold or scrapped.
This remarkably intact representative of this setup seems to have been left more or less as it was when the new times came. It gives a fantastic insight of the small-scale operation of local farming that was commonplace just forty years ago.
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