Milk Delivery

In other memories of my early childhood, I often think of the job that was usually mine, of first, lighting a wood fire in the kitchen stove of the lower house and then heating a wash boiler full of water that I used to wash the milk bottles for the next day's delivery. The bottles were filled in the evening after the milk was thoroughly cooled. We used a common garden watering can to fill the bottles and then capped them by hand. This did not take very long because there were usually only sixty or seventy quarts to be prepared. The milk was then left on a bench overnight to be loaded into the wagon and delivered early the next morning. In the warm weather we often had ice to put on the bottles to keep them cool. In the bad weather of winter my father, and later my brothers, often had much trouble in getting out the lane because of the snow. It often accumulated in drifts in the lane so deep that they would have to use the fields, usually with an extra horse to get out to Ridge Avenue. At other times they would have much trouble on the hills of Manayunk. At one time Joe was driving alone up the hill in the woods at the bottom of Domino Lane early in the morning when the horse slipped and fell. Joe unfastened him form the wagon but still could not get him up. Joe then walked home for help and when he arrived back with Mike, the horse was missing. They later found him on Umbria Street about a quarter mile away at the lower end of the back pasture.