MOUNT SAVAGE — As efforts throughout Allegany County are made to preserve its history, a significant piece was lost Saturday during the snowstorm.

Ed and Rhonda Crossland, owners of the last dairy farm in the county, are calling it quits after the weight of more than 2 feet of snow caused the collapse of half the roof on the 125-foot-long barn shortly after 2:30 p.m. Saturday. At the time of collapse, 38 head of dairy cattle were inside the single-story building, though none suffered serious injury.

“There’s no longer a dairy farm in Allegany County,” Ed Crossland said Monday. “My cows have left. We’re hauling the last out today. It has shut me down. This is probably the first time Allegany County’s been without one. We’re probably going to sell the majority of the cattle.”

The rest of the purebred animals will be kept for breeding purposes, he said.

The farm is located on the Maryland/Pennsylvania border situated atop Bald Knob Road, a 1.5-mile stretch of rural blacktop that’s “one of the most difficult roads to open in the county,” Crossland said, because of its 500-foot elevation gain.

Crossland, a local attorney, praised volunteers from the Mount Savage Volunteer Fire Department and Allegany County Roads Division workers who helped to clear a path sufficient to come to the cows’ aid.

“They were magnificent,” Crossland said.

If the incident had occurred about five minutes later, Crossland said he and herdsman Rodney Rankin would have been in the building.

“When it came down, it came down in the center,” Crossland said. “Of course, the cows are tied facing the outside walls. It came down in the center ... most of the cows were lying down. As a result, the ceiling came to rest partly on the stalls.”

In a photo taken by 15-year-old Colleen Crossland, the roof can be seen resting against a 2-inch steel pipe through which raw milk traveled to a collection point. Volunteers, including Rhonda Crossland, Colleen, Rankin and his wife, Linda Ranking and son Greg, all helped to cut the stalls apart to free the cattle.

“One by one, we got about 22 cows out,” Crossland said of the animals stuck beneath the collapsed structure.

Rebuilding is not feasible, Crossland said, in no small part because the amount of snow makes it impractical for the forseeable future.

Several months ago, Crossland acknowledged that dairy farmers across the state and country were having trouble keeping up operations. Collectively, dairy farmers faced “the lowest milk prices, probably, in the history of milk being priced since 1937,” Crossland said. “In real numbers, we were getting paid about a third the cost of our production.”

He attributed the issue to an outdated federal formula “that was developed in the Depression ... it threw us back into one,” Crossland said.

But dairy farmers had started to see signs of improvement. Prices began to climb. In addition, pedigreed cattle breeders like Crossland used the sale of embryos to supplement incomes, which allowed Crossland to continue a family tradition that began when his grandfather raised registered cows on a family farm near Midland in the late 1920s.

Crossland and approximately 1,000 other regional dairy farmers sell their milk through Lanco Pennland Quality Milk Co-Op in Hagerstown. Crossland serves as general counsel to the co-op.

Crossland said his cattle produced about 45,000 pounds of milk a month — what is considered a small operation. He began farming at the Mount Savage location in 1998.

Contact Kevin Spradlin at kspradlin@times-news.com.