Collections record Beta

Milk Bottle

2014-30-1

Large glass milk bottle. One side impressed with the Echo Farms logo ("E" "C" "H" "O" overlap each other). The other side impressed "THE ECHO FARMS CO./ BOTTLE/ AND MUST BE RETURNED/ REGISTERED."

From the mid-1800s well into the twentieth century, Litchfield's fortunes remained closely tied to the Connecticut dairy industry. Echo Farm originated in 1869 as little more than a hobby for F. Ratchford Starr, a Philadelphia insurance executive who purchased his first sixty-six acres in East Litchfield with the hope of improving his health by throwing himself into dairy farming. By 1878 its owner had committed himself to developing his property into a model of agricultural efficiency. Within a decade of Echo Farm's founding on present-day East Litchfield Road, Starr had increased his acreage by nearly tenfold and had expanded his herd from five cows to one-hundred head of the choicest Jersey purebreds. Echo Farm had also become the first dairy enterprise in the United States to commercially bottle and distribute milk, which Starr shipped daily to New York by freight car from his private ice house next to the Bantam train depot.

• Echo Farm Company

ca. 1940

Height 9"

• glass