The days of milk delivery seem so long ago that the use of the cliché after the birth of a child who resembles neither parent dates us! But that changed in March when Mountain Dairy made the decision to reinstitute the delivery service through the course of the pandemic, and the milkman resumed his route.
Corey Thatcher, who stopped delivering milk to households in 2012, was happy to return to the familiar red and gold milk truck and to customers’ homes, where many of those Mountain Dairy milk boxes remained on many a front door step. On the first day, Thayer made twenty deliveries. In less than a week, he delivered to ninety customers in eighteen towns. Now there are many customers ordering home delivery of all varieties of milk, cream, juice, butter and eggs. Mountain Dairy has also teamed with another legendary provider of beverages, Hosmer Mountain, to offer for delivery Root Beer, Birch Beer, and Seltzer.
The Stearns family has owned and operated Mountain Dairy Farm since 1772 with the premise that “all milk is not created equal”. Connoisseurs of fine dairy products note the distinction in a freshness that comes from organic everything. The family grows its own corn and hay and takes exceptional care of the cows and the processing methods. “We do our best to make sure your milk tastes every bit as delicious as the milk produced by the ten generations of Stearns Family that have worked the land before us,” their website boasts. Milk delivery to households started in 1871 and continued for 140 years, until a decline in orders and customers forced the difficult decision to cease that particular service. With the imposed social distancing, reinstituting delivery was an easier decision.
This is just the most recent chapter in the long history of milk delivery in Hampton. Milk, its production and delivery, has been an integral part of our town’s operations since our incorporation, with dairy farms the number one industry through the first half of the 20th century. From “Hampton Remembers”:
We had five or six cows and we sold milk to the neighbors. All around us was summer folks, you might say. That was my job, I used to run around to the neighbors and deliver the milk on my bicycle, the bottles of milk in the basket on the handlebars. Those days we got ten cents a quart. Dad got eight cents and I got two for deliverin’ it.
Robert Fitts
When I was a small boy my day started about ha’ past five or a little earlier than that because we had to have our milk cooled and down to Elliot Station by seven o’clock.
Harold Stone
I used to go a lot to the railroad cause every morning the milk went to the railroad train and for years my father, and my grandfather earlier, they drove the milk truck and we’d make the rounds, pick up the milk, go either to Hampton or over to Clark’s Corner – let’s see, we picked up from four farms. And then we would go to the milk train at Hampton station but that being a dirt road, it was easier to go to Clark’s Corner – the milk train stopped in both places.
George Fuller
The first train in the morning was the milk train goin’ east to Boston, a little before seven. That was the biggest pick-up anywhere along the line, at Hampton station. They brought milk in there from Hampton, Chaplin, Ashford, Eastford.
John Hammond
My father, George Kimball…shipped his milk to Boston – first, I remember, in eight-quart cans with wooden plugs and then later they got out the twenty-quart cans with the metal cap. At times the milkmen went on regular strike and would hold all the milk at home. And then we had a big cream separator and we separated the cream and took it to Brooklyn to the creamery where they made butter out of it.
Arthur Kimball
All the farmers here sold their milk to the Whiting Milk Company in Boston. They had platforms by the railroad tracks that were even with the doors of the cars and they’d bring the cans there and then the empties would be thrown out onto the platform – and they were never washed. You had to wash the cans yourself. They held eight or eight-and-a-half quarts and had a handle and a wooden stopper. And those stoppers were always sour, most of the year, they had to be boiled. The last that I remember their being used Josie Smith washed the cans for the Lincolns and the Hammonds and I don’t know how many more. That was her job and they paid her. We took them to her house where she washed them. Usually one person collected the milk from all the farms in the neighborhood and took it to the station.
John Lewis
Another of my jobs was to scrub those milk cans and how I hated it. Believe me they had to be scrubbed to pass my mother’s inspection! We’d use a cloth and very strong soap, hot water – and she’d say “take your fingernail and go ‘round the seams” – really to get things clean — and then they had to be scalded with boiling water, of course, and dried.
Evelyn Estabrooks
Mountain Dairy delivers to Hampton on Tuesdays. Orders must be received by 2PM the day prior to the delivery. Payment is cash or check at the time of delivery to the driver. If you no longer have a milk box, you may leave out a cooler. Orders can be placed online at: www.mountaindairy.com, or call 860-423-9289.