The New Fangled Egg Grading Machine 1948

Here's a little knowledge today to go with your Sunday morning eggs!

 A previous post about the Reston Creamery here does not mention another part of this business that included the sale and raising of eggs and chickens.  An Egg Pool had been set up in the basement of Berry Hardware and later in the Cates block for farmers to bring their eggs to be sold to locals without their own birds. With the opening of the Reston Creamery in 1946, there was soon to be eggs bought and sold there as well.   The following article from April 1948 in the Reston Recorder explains how an automatic egg grader works.  So many things that had been done by people were being taken over by machines and the citizens of the times seem amazed. 

Recently installed in the Reston Creamery is an automatic egg grading machine. The machine, which speeds the grading of eggs by fifty percent, is practically fool proof, does everything but lay the eggs.

Operated by Jean Dooley and Marian Jezzard, the speed with which eggs are packed and graded is a sight to behold. Jean is in charge of the operations. She takes the eggs from the crates as they are delivered from the farms, candles them and separates them into A, B, craxs or rejects. "A" eggs are then placed on a inclined slot, where they roll down into the grading machine. There is another slot for B and a third for craxs.

Once placed on the machine amazing things happen. Rolling down the slot, the machine admits one egg at a time into the grading machine proper. In the A line up the first thing that happens is the machine prints each egg with a Canada stamp. The eggs are then moved forward by means of a moving trough. The first stop is the scale, the trough recedes and the egg sits on a miniature scale. If it is heavy enough, the scale trips and the egg rolls into a tray labelled A large. If it is not heavy enough for this classification, it moves forward again to a further set of scales, until it is finally deposited into the right classification tray. A eggs are classified into A jumbos, A large, A medium and A pullet. B eggs move down the other side of the machine. Here the same process as with the A grades is repeated. However there are only two scales on this side of the machine for B or C eggs. Also these eggs are not printed with the Canada Stamp.

The packing of eggs for shipment to the market is in charge of Marian Jezzard.

An interesting side note to this story is that Miss Jean Dooley from Hartney not only found work in Reston, she found love too!  Jean was married to Marion's big brother Frank Jezzard in April of 1949 and went on to raise a family and be a part of the community at Linklater and Reston.  

On the same topic but in another town, the above 2 Egg Statements were issued to my paternal Grandmother, Mary (Sinclair) Simms, at Oak River during the same time period.  Looks like B eggs were what her hens hens laid most of but if I'm reading the yellow one correctly, (and tell me if I'm not, Dad) Grandma received $5.76 for 24 dozen eggs! Crazy when I snapped up an 18 pack in the store last week because they were on sale for $5.99.   😲