KAWARTHA LAKES-In the 1950s, when George Bick was delivering Kawartha Dairy milk in Bobcaygeon with a horse-drawn wagon, electricity was not yet universal, and refrigerators were just starting to become common. Most families would receive milk every day or two to ensure that it was fresh enough to drink. Since practically everybody in the village bought milk regularly, home delivery was convenient both for Kawartha Dairy and their customers. Typically, only those who lived in town would receive milk on their doorstep in the morning—farm families usually produced their own. On farms, a lot of milk was fed to pigs, because it was scarcely marketable before the advent of refrigeration—unlike butter, which could be preserved with salt.
Old Dolly was Kawartha Dairy’s much loved delivery horse—school kids often wanted to ride her. She lived in a barn behind Jack & Ila Crowe’s house on Prince Street. Jack had devised an oat bin that opened automatically when an alarm clock went off, so the horse was already fed by the time that he got to the barn in the morning. The milk run would begin shortly after dawn, and often lasted until about 2 pm. Often Jack or Ila did the route themselves, or had George help them. He was a farmer who lived in North Verulam, and was delivering milk on the side. He is remembered as being a laid back, older gentleman.
The delivery driver would have a pouch to store the money from each house. Many customers would buy books of milk tickets and put out a ticket or two to indicate how much milk they wanted to purchase. Having done the route countless times, the horse knew where it was going and would cooperatively walk along the street as the delivery driver stopped by each house. When it came to Clarence Poole’s Kawarthe Garage (now CIBC), the driver would carry the milk to the house and cut through the alley to the next street, and the horse knew enough to head over to Sherwood Street on its own. At another stop, Old Dolly knew to turn around as the driver was delivering milk to the house.
Milk was packaged in glass bottles, which were a common shape and design between different dairies. Each dairy would have their own distinctive milk cap, which also indicated the type of milk being bottled. At the time, some other dairies like Silverwoods (Lindsay) sold cream top milk, which was non-homogenized whole milk, where the cream would literally rise to the top, packaged in a special bottle with a flare on the neck, to allow customers to scoop the cream out with a spoon. By the 1950s, Kawartha Dairy was separating the cream out of the milk, and selling different grades of homogenized milk including skim milk, pasteurized (whole) milk, 2% milk, 10% cream and whipping cream. Murphy’s Dairy (now Kawartha Settlers Village) sold raw milk, and would close when pasteurization became mandatory.
For the Crowe family, picking up milk—initially just from a few farms in the vicinity of Bobcaygeon—and delivering it was a large part of the job. In the second year after Jack and Ila Crowe purchased the business in 1937, Jack broke his leg while training a horse and Ila, assisted by one employee had to do the deliveries. Many of the second generation of the Crowes who would go on to work in the dairy business literally grew up riding around with their parents as they delivered milk. For fifteen years, Ila delivered milk, often with her six children in tow.
In 1960, Kawartha Dairy acquired their first refrigerated truck, as the old horse drawn wagons passed into history. As household refrigeration was becoming the norm, the days of transporting milk without cooling it ended. Packaging was also evolving, as Kawartha Dairy switched from glass bottles, to paper cartons, then jugs, before milk bags were adopted—which remain standard to this day. Over the years with improved processing techniques and refrigeration, milk began to keep much longer. By the 1970s, a bag of milk would last for two weeks—and today they can last for three weeks. Few customers today would feel comfortable drinking milk in the condition it would have been after three hours in a delivery wagon in the 1930s. People started buying milk at the grocery or corner store, instead of having it delivered to their homes. In 1980, Kawartha Dairy phased out home delivery.
With the advent of trucks, refrigeration and as Kawartha Dairy was relieved from the laborious job of delivering milk to each home, it became practical and necessary for dairies to serve a much larger area. When Jack and Ila Crowe bought the business, they only served part of Bobcaygeon, but as the decades passed small family run dairies closed, as businesses got larger. By 1990, Kawartha Dairy had sixteen trucks and two tractor trailers on the road. Today they sell milk throughout south central Ontario and ice cream as far away as British Columbia. Though the dairy still produces many of the same varieties of milk as in the 1950s, today the business moves at an entirely different pace from the days when George Bick and Old Dolly walked around town peddling milk.
This story is part of our partnership with Maryboro Lodge, The Fenelon Falls Museum and was written by Glenn Walker.
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