Time was when Upper Valley households were likely to get their milk delivered to their door in bottles by a cheery route driver from one of the iconic hometown dairy plants that dotted the region. That was before large supermarkets came along to dominate the area’s grocery trade and a few major New England brands took over the processing and distribution of fluid milk.

And with that sweeping change went the returnable glass milk bottle. Except, after passage of a few decades, milk in glass suddenly reappeared on the Upper Valley market, appealing to a bloc of consumers convinced that glass-bottled milk seems to get colder and taste fresher. They won’t get their milk brought to their doorstep, but they’ll find as many as a half dozen local brands in stores these days.

Hatchland Dairy of North Haverhill pioneered the rebirth of glass-bottled milk in 1992, followed shortly by McNamara Dairy of Plainfield and then came later entrants like Strafford Organic, Berway of Lyme, Norwich Creamery and Roby Farm of Piermont.

The days of home-delivered milk trace far back into the 19th century, when enterprising farmers around urbanizing communities started “peddling” milk to householders no longer interested in keeping a family cow or fetching their milk from a near neighbor. Horse-drawn milk wagons were ubiquitous on the streets and roads of New Hampshire and Vermont, and often they’d be bringing along butter, baked goods and other commodities to sell.

Change would occur in the 1880s when Louis Pasteur and other scientists began unlocking the mysteries of bacteriology and the public health community of the time started advocating what came to be called pasteurization — heating of milk to kill dangerous pathogens commonly found in cow’s milk. These organisms could cause a range of human diseases, from gastrointestinal afflictions to the dreaded undulant fever. Infant mortality in New Hampshire approached a staggering 25% in the late 1890s, much of it attributable to contaminated raw milk, but it would take decades to overcome skepticism and outright hostility toward the practice of pasteurization.

But as resistance slowly ebbed, central facilities to safely process farm milk were developed. Milk labeled “pasteurized” began to win consumer favor and public health authorities would battle into the 1930s to require all milk offered for sale to the public to be pasteurized.

The milk supply system would become a bifurcated one — consolidated plants receiving and processing the milk from multiple farms, and then what are still called in dairy industry jargon “producer-handlers” — operations where cows are milked and their milk processed all at one location.

Ken Wheeler, of Enfield, is a lifer in the Upper Valley dairy business. After a short stint as a carpenter, he went to work at the Honey Gardens dairy plant in Lebanon in 1968. He loves to talk about those long ago days.

“It was all glass bottles then. There was creamline milk, nobody wanted skim in those days, then for a while skim was big, and now whole milk rules again. Phil Townsend had started Honey Gardens, he was a famous bee man, and Arthur Clark owned it when I started.

“We had a tanker truck and it went around to farms picking up milk — Vaughn Farm in Thetford, Norman Townsend’s in Lebanon, Louis Maxfield’s and a bunch of farms down in Hartland. I worked in the plant, though some days I would deliver to Canaan College and Cardigan Mountain School out in Canaan.”

Jim Austin would buy out Clark and with Wheeler they ran Honey Gardens until the business was sold and the two migrated to Wilder where they ran Billings-Starlake Dairy for several years.

“Then Idlenot (a large Springfield, Vt., processor) bought it and they ran it into the ground in six or eight years,” Wheeler recalls. That would be essentially the end of home-delivered milk in the region for good.

There were two notable producer-handler operations in the Upper Valley in those years: Dartmouth Dairy in Hanover, run by Hazlett and Wilson Fullington, and Winona Dairy of Lebanon, operated by Volney Slack. And another Lebanon brand was Super-Test, a venture of Harvey Bassey and Hershey Packard, which contracted to have its milk processed at the Honey Gardens plant.

Work as a home delivery milk man was always hard. One had to be strong and quick; crates full of bottled milk could weigh around 60 pounds and needed to be carefully loaded in the truck so they wouldn’t shift around. The stops would be numerous and routes were covered two or three times in a week. Most deliveries went into an insulated metal box on the customer’s doorstep, and the empty bottles going back to the plant to be washed and refilled had to be trundled back to the truck.

Sometimes customers trusted the driver to come into the kitchen and put the day’s order right into their refrigerator; payment would be left on the counter. Some dairies required drivers to collect and remit payments, others used delivery slips and billed customers from the office.

The favorite milk delivery truck was called a Divco, a make that started in 1926 and would be the mainstay vehicle of the business until 1986. In its heyday, the Divco sported a distinctive snub nose ahead of a utilitarian box body configured expressly for the home delivery milk business. It was designed so that the driver could stand while darting from stop to stop; it had hand controls for throttle and brakes. Divcos today are hot items in the collector vehicle market, with one sale of a perfectly restored model recently going for $175,000, according to an online report.

The demise of Billings and its brethren didn’t mean the end of the careers of Wheeler and Austin, who died in 2021, for they would later go on to play key roles in the rebirth of local dairy processing and marketing in the Upper Valley region.

After a tough combat tour in Vietnam, Howard Hatch came home in 1969 with a dream to start dairy farming. He began with 19 cows and a cobbled-up assortment of equipment on a hardscrabble farm in Grafton. A couple of years later, he migrated to North Haverhill and in the 54 years since he has built a New Hampshire Farm of Distinction on a Connecticut River oxbow that is believed to contain the largest single tract of tillable farmland in the state.

In 1992, Hatch added a new dimension to Hatchland Farm: a dairy plant to process the milk from his 300 cows. He scoured the country for the equipment sized for his new venture and set about to build facilities to comply with complex government standards. The milk would be bottled in glass, and the target market would be Hanover northward. Later Hatchland would begin contract processing for a fast-growing home delivery milk business in wealthy suburbs south of Boston, a dimension that his farm continues pursuing today with multiple home-delivery outfits in Massachusetts. Along the way, the farm started a popular ice cream stand, farm store and a butcher shop on busy Route 10.

Hatchland became the first new dairy processor in New Hampshire since before World War II, a time when milk plant after milk plant was closing up and remaining industrial-scale processors like H.P. Hood were beginning to dominate in the market.

In 1994, the McNamara Dairy in Plainfield came on line with its own processing plant and targeted its sales area from Hanover along the Connecticut River south to the Massachusetts border. Like Hatchland, McNamara bottles its milk in glass and a portion in plastic containers. The farm has added “creamees” using its own butterfat and maple flavoring, dispensed from windows at the farm sugarhouse and a mobile sugarhouse-themed concession trailer.

In recent years, the Upper Valley has seen additional entrants in the glass-bottled milk game. All have one thing in common: reliance on North America’s lone manufacturer of glass milk bottles. It’s Stanpac of Ontario, and right now the supply chain is being disrupted by steep tariffs imposed on imports from Canada by the Trump Administration. Though virtually all glass milk bottles theoretically come back to the home processing plant because of deposits placed on them at point of sale, it’s not the case in reality.

Along the way, bottles get broken, tossed in the rubbish, become floral vases or are picked up by collectors. The shrinkage is nearly continuous and requires frequent resupply from Stanpac. Many an Upper Valley wedding in recent years has had tables adorned with flower arrangements placed in bottles bearing a local dairy’s label.

Collection of glass milk bottles is a surprisingly extensive hobby in the Northeast, and at the center are a handful of enthusiasts who collect, document, buy, sell and lecture about old milk bottles. One is Jim George of Milford, N.H., who maintains a directory of the old-time milk bottles of New Hampshire and Vermont; New Hampshire entries alone exceed 900 different farms and processors.

A reasonably good collection representing the Upper Valley region should include Honey Gardens, Billings, Dartmouth, Winona, Super-Test, Newport, Duane Lawrence (Claremont), Old Homestead (Windsor) Fairlea Farms and Guimond (Claremont area), Idlenot, and Lotta Rock (northern Grafton County) and surely more rare specimens from long ago.

As for Ken Wheeler and the late Jim Austin, when Billings finally expired, they became consultants to some of the milk bottling enterprises that were springing up around New England and eventually as far off as Oklahoma. Wheeler is still in the game today, pulling two shifts a week at McNamara Dairy’s plant in Plainfield.

Retired dairy farmer Steve Taylor of Meriden contributes occasionally to the Valley News.