Home Delivery

Delivery trucks brought milk, ice, food, oil (above), and other necessities to homes and businesses.

NPS Collection

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cuyahoga Valley families purchased goods through a large home-shopping network that brought dairy products, bread, fruits, vegetables, ice, coal, oil, and tea directly to their farmstead. From carts drawn by horses or cattle, delivery men sold most food items that a family needed to survive. The milk delivery business was especially competitive around the Cuyahoga Valley. In the morning, the milkman left a quart-sized bottle of milk, cottage cheese, and other requested dairy products outside the home's side door. To order more milk, the family left a note for the milkman outside in the empty bottles.

 

• Milk Delivery

  
  

  2011 Oral History Project: Ott Wilson, who worked on Hale Farm in the 1930s, describes his father's milk delivery business.

  Credit / Author:

  Ott Wilson

  Audio Transcript

  “My dad had this milk route . . . he hauled milk into Akron from the farmers in the area out there. We didn't make much money on the farm, he made it otherwise. Well he had to go to all the farms and some of the milk was on stands out in front, most of it he had to get out of the milk house and load it on the truck and then he had to go into town, Akron, with it. He had several farms, oh fifteen, twenty maybe, I don't know. Well he went pret'near to Peninsula and all around Ira and over across the river and up in the hill in Bath. Not too much in Bath. That's about as far as he went.”

 

• A Shave and Tie for the Milkman

  
  

  2011 Oral History Project: Ott Wilson, who worked on Hale Farm in the 1930s, describes why his father always looked his best.

  Credit / Author:

  Ott Wilson

  Audio Transcript

  “My dad, he had all kinds of friends, all the people that he hauled milk to. ~laughs~ The women would always be out there, waiting for him to come, to talk to him. He went to go to work hauling milk, he'd have a tie on . . . he'd shave every morning – have a tie on, shirt on, overhauls you know. He wouldn't go out of the house without a shave and a tie on.”

 

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