Collecting a Country Icon: Vintage Milk Bottles

From the 1890s to the 1950s, the most common way that American households received milk was in glass bottles delivered by a local dairy. Today, those very bottles are a hot collectible.

“Right now, the collecting trend is people looking for bottles from a dairy that was once in their own family,” says Ralph Riovo, a milk bottle collector and dealer whose Macungie, Pennsylvania, business is called The Purple Cow (www.papurplecow.com). “This country was so agricultural that at one time every town had several dairies,” explains Riovo. “All you needed was a couple of cows and you were in business. But it was hard work and many families stopped or sold to a bigger dairy. Most of the bottles were destroyed when they were no longer needed.”

In addition to bottles from their own family’s dairy, collectors today look for bottles from the dairy they remember from their childhood, or from a college they attended. “Many colleges, especially at big state schools, have their own dairy,” says Riovo.

Nostalgia aside, the appeal of old dairy bottles is also aesthetic. Starting in the 1930s, a pyroglazing technique was used to silkscreen and fire a design onto a glass milk bottle. “Before 1930, the bottles were embossed, but embossed bottles all look similar from a distance,” notes Riovo. For the pyro bottles, red was the most popular color, followed by orange, maroon, green, and gold. People avoided blue initially, according to Riovo, because it made the milk look bluish, which was a sign of skim milk or watered-down milk. “Around the time of World War II, two colors were used in pyroglazing, and red and blue were a popular combination with the white milk,” says Riovo.

The pyro decorations on pre-1950s bottles include the dairy name and town, as well as slogans, pictures of people, and pictures of a type of cow. Some collectors look specifically for bottles with war slogans (“For Victory, Buy United States Savings Bonds and Stamps,” says a 1943 bottle in his collection, for example) rather than searching for bottles from a particular region.

Prices for 1900s-1950s milk bottles range from $50 to $3,500 (the latter price is for a rare ruby-red Borden’s prototype bottle that was never put into production); average price is $100 to $300 for a quart-size bottle, which is the most common size.

For display, collectors often put tiny styrofoam beads (made especially for milk bottle display and available through The Purple Cow) in the bottles to give the appearance of milk.

For more information about collecting vintage dairy bottles, check out the Web site of the National Association of Milk Bottle Collectors (www.milkbottlecollectors.com), which publishes a newsletter called The Milk Route.