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Saturday, November 09, 2013

1885: EWING TOWNSHIP AND OUR FIRST MILK BOTTLES

What a fascinating story! I had never heard of the Mourne Dairy nor the McEvoy connection. However, this article tells of the revolutionary new invention of the glass bottle to deliver to local customers. Heretofore, the dairy delivered the milk in those huge aluminum type cans, and carefully ladled out the appropriate measure to a specific household. The article above has me wondering if the Mourne Dairy Farm was located at or in the area of the Johnson Farm on Bear Tavern Road. Perhaps a local Ewing historian can enlighten us. The bottle on the right is a typical glass bottle from the mid to late 1880's and was downloaded from a bottle information post via a Google search.

2 comments:

SJBill said...

I guess there had to be a time before bottles and they were probably using milk-pails and capped cans like you find on E-Bay. I would imagine they were containers larger than a quart, but the materials were likely not aluminum.

Commercial production of aluminum requires lots of electrical power and there was very little juice to go around in those days. Alcoa, the first commercial producer here, didn't get going until 1888.

The milk pails and cans were likely hammered copper or galvanized steel.

Another possible contributor to the bad taste at the bottom of the can was with the ice boxes used then. And Pasteurization didn't come on line until the late 1880s.

We've come a long way since then, haven't we.

Tom Glover said...

Thanks for those comments, Bill. Never even gave it a thought about the aluminum containers until you brought it up. Thanks for keeping me honest and for your loyalty to this site.

TOM