Claude Miller

Claude Miller was a milkman who lived on the east side of the intersection of Route 27 and Lakeview Road in West Harbor. He wrote this memoir in 1954 describing his years on his milk route. In 2000 Alton Swett, son of Chester Swett, gave the manuscript to the historical society. While not a skilled writer, Claude passed on details of his milkman career very well. I supplied the parenthetical remarks. Barbara Rumsey

Quite often someone asks me how many years I have been selling milk. I think it is about 55 from the starting point, but it is at least 50 without a break.

I started a milk route on the east side and I had all of the milk customers from Union Street to the street back of the schoolhouse [Union Court], and up the street by Captain Brad Murray [Campbell Street]. There was two prices on milk. Then some dealers carried two different size quarts, one was for five cents; the other for six cents. Inspectors and licenses hadn't been heard of then.

Handling Households

The customer set a pitcher or can outside for the milk to be poured into, and some places you were suppose to go inside. One woman told me about a milkman that she had who came into the kitchen and poured out her quart and a pint of milk. Then he said, “That milk looks good enough to drink, and he poured some into the quarter measure and drank it.” In later years when bottles were being used and milk was ten cents per quart, one customer said when she was pouring out the last of the milk, a dime came out of the bottle—perhaps that was just a bonus.

After I had retailed milk two years, I sold out and went to Chelsea, Massachusetts one winter. I worked for G. H. Curley up near Woodlawn Cemetery. I got 150 cans of milk off the train each day, drove them with a pair of horses through Everett, over to Charleston, and down Rutherford Avenue. I also spent some time on milk routes in Everett, Chelsea and Revere. Some people told me that you couldn't haul milk in an auto as it spoiled the milk. They said Flood's wasn't using any automobiles for delivery in Boston (that was right). It is surprising how intelligent some people can be and still be wrong.

Back to Boothbay

Retail milk was all sold in bottles then, and I made up my mind that if I ever sold milk again it would be in bottles. I started a milk route in Boothbay that year and some people objected to bottles. As near as I can remember there is more than forty here that started selling milk that have come and gone.

I often think of a man that lived over near the high school that kept a few cows and a yoke of oxen. He had a pasture, out near the Delano place [now Farm 23] on the East Boothbay road. He also had a field up near the Harold Whitehouse place [near the Railway Village]. This man had quite a large bony frame and a grizzly beard. He went by the name of Major Anderson. Sundays he was sexton at the Methodist Church. He wore black clothes, white shirt, a Prince Albert cravat, and a shiny beaver hat. There was no town water at that time. [Piped water started spreading around the Harbor in the 1890s.] People depended on wells and cisterns, and the Major doing the trucking for them with his oxen. It might be interesting to know who the first milkman was on Squirrel Island.

Long years ago I was buying some hay of Captain John Hodgdon [of Hodgdon’s Cove]. His father owned two fishing vessels. At the age of 18 he was captain of one of the vessels. When he retired from being captain, he kept a few cows, bought milk from Capt. Frank Hodgdon, and raised vegetables to sell. He rowed a dory every day with milk and vegetables around Squirrel through the summer season, when there wasn't many cottages on the island. In later years the island was supplied with milk from cows that were kept at Damariscove. Four men with wheelbarrows, cans, and a quart measure delivered the milk on the island.