Horse Drawn Wagons for Milk and Bread Delivery, 1940s, by Jim Low

From MemoryArchive

Who: Jim Low
What: Horse Drawn wagons for milk and bread delivery
When: 1940s
Where: Ottawa and Toronto, Canada

Horse-drawn milk wagons and bread wagons delivered milk and bread to the door daily as I was growing up in the 1940s in Ottawa and Toronto. Upon arrival of the milk or bread wagon, I enjoyed visiting the horses and sometimes fed them apples, or oats if the delivery man gave me the oats. Deliveries were daily. Preservatives of the day did not allow storage of milk and bread for more than a couple of days, and many people had limited or no refrigeration. We had an Ice Box. Our Ice Box had two compartments: the top compartment was where the block of ice would be placed, with a little room for items than had to be kept cold. There was a drain from that compartment to a pan under the Ice Box to store the water from the melting ice, and had to be emptied daily. The second compartment under the ice was dry and cool, but not cold. Ice was delivered 2 or 3 times a week by the Ice Man, also with horse drawn cart. No stoop-and-scoop in those days! Horse dung was deposited on the street, and every few days the street cleaner would come along to wash the dung down the sewer. We had to watch where we walked! Milk was in quart size glass returnable bottles, with a cardboard tab on top. We bought milk tokens, and placed the number empty of bottles and tokens outside the door for the number of bottles we wanted that day. No one would steal the tokens or milk. The bread man came to the door to ask for your daily needs, or you left a note with bread tokens. Milk was not homogenised: cream settled on top, and we had to shake it to mix it up. Sometimes my parents would skim off some of the cream for coffee, before we shook it up. If we didn't promptly retrieve the delivered milk on cold winter mornings, the milk would freeze and expand out the top a couple of inches, pushing off the cardboard tab which was placed on the top of the glass milk bottles.