It’s still three months before the United States would enter World War II, and Jack Delano is already traveling the country documenting people and industry at work. He found himself at the United Farmers’ Cooperative Creamery in Sheldon Springs, Vermont on a September day in 1941. He photographed this worker shoveling chunks of ice over the milk cans that have just been loaded into a refrigerated railroad car (a reefer in railroad parlance). One would assume that there is no icing dock in Sheldon Springs, thus requiring the workers to cover the cans with large ice chunks as we see here.

There is no information with the photograph indicating what railroad line this creamery is served by, but I would speculate that it’s the Central Vermont based on where Sheldon Springs is located (just below Canada).