Antique Milk Bottles

Milk Bottles

History

Before milk bottles, milkmen filled the customers' jugs. For many collectors, milk bottles carry a nostalgic quality of a bygone age. The most prized milk bottles are embossed or pyroglazed (painted) with names of dairies on them, which were used for home delivery of milk so that the milk bottles could find their way back to their respective dairies.

It is not clear when the first milk bottles came into use. However, the New York Dairy Company is credited with having the first factory that produced milk bottles, and the first patents for a milk container is held by the Lester Milk Jar on January 29, 1878 - US patent number 199837, filed on September 22, 1877. There are many other similar milk containers from around this period, including the Mackworh Pure Jersey Cream crockery type jar, the Manorfield Stock Farm, the Manor, the Pa glass wide mouth jar, and the Tuthill's Dairy Unionville, NY.
The Express Dairy Company in England began delivery glass milk bottles in 1880 and, thus, may have been among the first to do so.
Lewis P. Whiteman holds the first patent for a glass milk bottle with a small glass lid and a tin clip (US patent number 225,900, granted March 23, 1880, filed on January 31, 1880. The next earliest patent is for a milk bottle with a dome type tin cap and was granted September 23, 1884 to Whitemen's brother, Abram V. Whiteman (US patent number 305,554, filed on January 31, 1880. This bottle has been found with cream line marks and is very valuable. The Whiteman brothers produced milk bottles based on these specifications at the Warren Glass Works Company in Cumberland, Maryland and sold them through their New York sales office.
The first milk-bottle-capping machine was designed, built, and overall invented by a Polish man named Menachem Wallach.
The Original Thatcher is one of the most desirable milk bottles for collectors. The patent for the glass dome lid is dated April 27, 1886. There are several variations of this early milk bottle and many reproductions. During this time period, many types of bottles were being used to hold and distribute milk. These include a pop bottle type with a wire clamp, used by the Chicago Sterilized Milk Company, Sweet Clover, and others.  Fruit jars were also used, but only the Cohansey Glass Manufacturing plant made them with dairy names embossed on them.

Very old wire cap milk bottle

Studying the base of a milk bottle will give some clues as to how it was made and what company might have manufactured the bottle.  Also many dairies took advantage of the space on the milk bottle base to add embossing to help identify their bottle.  One thing that one will not find is a pontil mark.  Many people, especially on ebay, describe milk bottles as having a pontil mark but this is not correct.  

 A pontil is where the glass blower attached a punty rod to hold the partially finished bottle so he could form the lip.  When the punty rod was snapped off the bottle, a rough scar was left on the base of the bottle (picture).  Pontil marks are found on bottles that date to the 1860's and before.  Since the first milk bottles did not appear till the late 1870's one will not find American milk bottles with pontil marks.  We have only heard of one early jar that was from Tuthill Dairy of Unionville, New York that was reported to have a pontil but this was not in the shape of a milk bottle.

As stated above, milk bottles appeared after the period of pontiled bottles.  Some of the earliest milk bottles will be mouth blown but they will have been blown in a three piece cup mold.  The three pieces are the base of the bottle and the two halves of the body.  Therefore there will be a mold seam just above the heel of the bottle, encircling the base and a mold seam up each side of the bottle disappearing at the neck.  The base of these mouth blown milk bottles will not have any mold seams.  These bottles will generally date prior to 1910.  Starting in the late 1800's, machines became available to blow bottles and were quickly adopted.  Machines could produce many more bottles in a day compared to a man thus reducing the cost and the bottles were more consistent.

The commonsense milk bottle with the first cap seat was developed as an economical means for sealing a reusable milk bottle by the Thatcher Manufacturing Company around 1900. Most bottles produced after this tantiqeime have a cap seat.

                                          An antique Brookfield Pink Baby Milk Bottle

One thing unique to dairy bottles is that they were reused many times.  This was probably due to the fact that milk had a short shelf life.  The consumer only needed the bottle for a couple weeks and milk was only sold locally.  A United States Department of Agriculture Survey in the early 1900's found that the average life span of a milk bottle was 22.5 trips with a range from 6 to 60 trips.
Milk bottles before the 1930s were round. In the 1940s, a square squat bottle became the more popular style. Milk bottles since the 1930s have used pyroglaze or ACL (Applied Color Label) to identify the bottles. Before the 1930s, names were embossed on milk bottles using a slug plate. The name was impressed on the slug plate, then the plate was inserted into the mold used to make the bottle - the result was the embossed name on the bottle. By the 1960s, in the United States, glass bottles had largely been replaced with paper cartons.

Chronology

• 1880 - British milk bottles were first produced by the Express Dairy Company. They were delivered by horse-drawn carts and delivered four times a day. The first bottles used a porcelain stopper top held on by wire.
• 1894 - Anthony Hailwood developed a pasteurisation process for milk which allowed it to be sterilized and be safely stored for longer periods. Milk could now be delivered once a day.
• 1920 - Advertisements began to appear on milk bottles. A sand-blasting technique was used to etch them on the glass.
• mid 1950s - Cardboard tops were deemed unhygienic and banned in some locations. Delivery by horse-drawn carts was still common.
• early 1990s - The advertising largely disappeared with the introduction of infrared bottle scanners designed to check cleanliness.