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Milk Bottle

(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved.
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Milk was delivered to households on a daily basis. Households maintained an account with a local dairy that specified the amount of milk and other dairy products to be delivered every day. Milk was left either on the doorstep or, in some homes, a special box or container. To keep track of their own bottles, dairies ordered glass decorated with their logos and other information. By the late 1930s, methods were discovered to anneal the dairies' logo into the glass; prior to that, that information was formed on the surface of the bottle using the pressed-glass method. Milk in bottles represented a step in the continuing process of mechanizing milk delivery, since in order for them to be sterile, dairies had to purchase steam cleaning machinery. Consequently, many dairy farmers began sending their milk to central bottling plants, often associated with larger dairy farms such as the one that made this bottle, the Wheeler & Taylor Dairy of Keene, New Hampshire.

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