Remember the days when glass bottles of milk were delivered each morning outside your door by a horse-drawn milk wagon? This was pre-depression days. The glass bottle had a little cardboard cap that kept the milk from spilling out. The bottle was returnable to the Marion City Dairy when empty with a note left in the bottle informing the delivery man how many bottles of milk you wanted.
I still have one on those Marion City Dairy bottles. It was given to me by Bessie Hastings whose husband, Robert J. Hastings, wrote a book titled A Nickel’s Worth of Skim Milk. He stated in his book that one Saturday morning, the dairy made an offer that anyone could buy a whole bucket of skim milk for a nickel. As long as the offer lasted, the Hastings family took advantage of it.
Eventually the horse-drawn wagons were replaced by motor trucks that delivered the milk to their customers. The Marion City Dairy had nine such trucks in 1953. On 26 March 1953, the dairy shifted its milk delivery back to horse-drawn vehicles. A twelve year old sorrel horse named Bill turned back the clock at least 20 years for Marion residents when he replaced a truck as the means of delivering Marion City Dairy milk in the north section of Marion. He was rapidly becoming a familiar figure to adults and children alike along his route. Most of the children found a horse-drawn vehicle a novelty. Adults viewed the horse-drawn milk truck as a half-forgotten memory.
Bill, a veteran of nine years of milk-delivery service in Decatur, was the first of three horses the dairy planned to put in use. Two others, both farm horses, were trained to familiarity with shafts of the cart. The horse-drawn wagons were to be used in other areas of the city and perhaps as an ice cream wagon.
Kenneth Avis and Carl Burgener, two of the partners in the dairy, felt there were solid, practical reasons for the change-over. One was that the later milk delivery allowed the driver to maintain more personal and friendly relations with his customers. The modem milkman at that time went for weeks without even seeing a customer by making early morning deliveries.
Thus, it was hoped the change would build good will. The owners claimed once the horses had learned their routes there would be little time difference between motor and horse deliveries. Two of the Marion City Dairy’s nine trucks would be replaced by the horses. Truck drivers would simply shift from steering wheels to reins.
The horses were kept at the Kenneth Avis farm at the end of East Everett Street. Their permanent residence would be a barn north of the dairy building at 412 North Van Buren Street. Driver Roy Edmondson of Marion said his horse, Bill, was trustworthy, that Bill knew the route well though he had been on the job only a few days. Bill covered half of the north section one day and the other half the next day. The two day route was 27 miles long, with approximately 500 customers. The school children especially found the sight of Bill ambling down the street hard to resist.
Time in 1953 returned for a short period to days of yesterday when all one had to do was go outside their door to find a bottle of milk delivered, but with the coming of supermarkets even the horse-drawn milk wagons couldn’t compete.
Marion City Dairy Inc., Kenneth E. Avis V. Pres., Grade A milk and Avis ice cream. “Quality has no substitute.” 412 North Van Buren Street.
(Originally titled “Remember the Days When Milk Was Delivered to Your Door”, written by Violett Lee Carter Grisham, published in “Footprints”, Williamson County Historical Society, Volume 10, #4, 2007)