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rrlund, and others - the old Carnation building in Sheridan

R

RayP(MI)

Well-known Member
Never dreamed it was this sadly neglected. What a scene of utter devastation. From the street it doesn't look that bad, thought until recently it was even used for warehousing. Especially when they took the trouble to board up the windows. Not much chance of that!
Drone view youtube
 
I've got a lot of old black and white pictures of that building when it as in operation if anybody wants to see them.
My brother was wanting to buy it and tear it down. He planned on running the brick and concrete through a crusher,salvaging the steel and selling the empty lot,but they just keep dragging their feet. As far as I know,the village owns it now. They unhooked the gas from it a few years ago so I thought they were finally ready to do something with it,but nothing more has happened.
 
I didn't realize the roof was that far gone. It doesn't look that bad from the ground.
I hauled the last load of milk in there on July 20 1975. My uncle worked in the receiving room for 35 years.
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Always amazes me that a building like that just sits and rots away. Deans Food plant in Evart is just setting there vacant now, maybe in 40 years it will look the same.
 
What might be a dumb question: Was this the main or only Carnation plant? Were there others in other dairy producing areas? The little county where I live in North Carolina used to have 100 dairy farms in the 50s-60s. Now we have maybe five.

Thanks for the link, and Randy's picture.

Garry
 
It was the plant that Carnation forgot they had. In the video it said something about it being their corporate offices or some such thing. Their headquarters were and probably still are,in California. A local guy was out there and stopped in at the main office. He told them where he was from. They weren't impressed. He told them they had a plant here. They denied it. He bet them $50 that they did. They found out he was right.
They made the little cans of evaporated milk here. It was originally built by Libby's,but later was sold to Carnation. Most of the old folks around here always called it the Libby's plant and never could get used to calling it Carnation.
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Darndest part of this one is,a guy who was the local FFA president a few years before I was,was a fruit grower. Right after the plant closed,he bought it. He got a local contractor to do $40,000 worth of renovations on it to turn it in to a fruit storage and processing plant. They were the ones who bricked up a bunch of the windows. Before they completed the work,the bank found out that the bonds and securities that he put up for collateral were forgeries. That didn't end well. Most folks around here were of the same way of thinking,that if the bank had just let him get away with it,that place probably would have thrived. Anybody who was smart enough to pull that big of a scam on the bank in the first place most likely would have been a genius in the business world.
 
Thanks for posting the link and rrlund for posting the pics.

Amazing that they have let it sit and deteriorate for forty years... that seems really odd.
 
Carnation started here in Washington. They started as the Pacific Condensed Milk Company. I suspect the Carnation name came from the dairy farms in Carnation, WA.
 
Asbestos remediation on that building would be expensive. That would need to be done prior to any other demolition. But with the roof in that condition, I don't even think it would be safe to enter the third level. Seems as if lots of towns have such buildings. That were once hustling bustling places with good workers. Now where is it? I'll leave that as a rhetorical question as I do not desire the thread to disappear. Thanks for posting.....gobble
 
There is a facinating one on Greystone an old New Jersey mental institution. I guess the drone can't go inside . Youtube has alot of these things. The old mental institutions all used the same style building. I can garantee you someone has ripped out the copper in that building since 1975.
 
The contractor why lost 40 grand on the first sale of the building ripped most of the wiring back out to try to cover some of his losses according to local folklore.
 
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