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“I think the heydey would have been in the late 1920s to the beginning of World War II,” said Haubner, a retired O.S.U. extension agent.
Haubner said the 1940 census listed 1,743 farms in Clark County that had two or more dairy cows. “Today, you’ve got four selling milk.”
“Before that time, there wasn’t any health regulations to speak of,” explained Gravenkemper, a retired dairyman. “A guy could just get some bottles and start bottling milk.”
Back then, “a lot of the bottles and caps had ‘TB and blood tested’ on their caps” to tout the relative safety of a dairy’s milk, said Haubner. Before pasteurization, “that was a big thing.”
The coming of pasteurization as a health standard had financial consequences, adding capital costs to cost of doing business — an advantage bigger operators milked for all they could.
“Borden’s came in here and bought up a bunch of smaller dairies,” said Soldner, a veterinarian whose veterinarian father looked after animals at Borden’s Spring Dale Farm west of George Rogers Clark Park.
World events also contributed to the decline of the mom-and-pop dairy. When World War II came, Haubner said, “all the help left.”
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If the wider sweep of dairy science and technology interests collectors, the links to local farm families feed their passion.
“I started selling milk when I was in high school,” said Gravenkemper, who raised Jersey Cows and was around the dairy business “for umpteen years.” He remembers Citizens Dairy, Blue Valley Creamery on Washington Street and that Earl Shoemaker of the South Charleston area “used to bottle and deliver milk for 7 cents a quart.”
A collector for about 25 years, among his favorite bottles are those from Elden Crabill’s Locust Grove Dairy. It was from Crabill that Gravenkemper bought his first registered calf.
The farm was at Possum Road and Leffels Lane and was home to the old schoolhouse that Ersie Miller later gave to Dayton’s Carillon Park, where it still sits.
“Elden’s daughter was Katherine Agle,” who later arranged for P. Buckley Moss to do a portrait of the Locust Grove School.
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Soldner goes back more than half a century in the dairy business.
“I bought my first dairy cow in 1956, and I’ve had dairy cows ever since then,” he said.
His bottle collection started with a bottle from Young’s.
“Bill Young and I were classmates in college,” he said, and Soldner has kept cows at the farm for more than 20 years.
Soldner also has a bottle from the old Whitehall Farm just south of Young’s.
“Morris Baird, who ended up as the manager of Borden’s here in town got one of his first jobs at Whitehall. He was what they called the fire marshal down there,” Soldner said.
During the Depression, the fire marshal’s job was to keep the rail-riding hoboes from setting their campfires too close to the barns.
Soldner said Chester Folk was the herdsman at Whitehall before he started his own operation.
“Springfield used to be the Jersey capital of the nation back in the 1950s and 1960s,” Gravenkemper explained, “and a good deal of it was due to Chet Folck.”
Folck’s grand champion Jersey females included Commando Etta Mercury, Sybil Design Etta and Golden Jersey Star, for whom Young’s Golden Jersey Inn is named.
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Haubner, who said he started collecting bottles “because I’m a history buff,” soon found friends encouraging his hobby.
He had a bottle from the H.F. Kohl Dairy that once was on Clarimont Avenue on the seat of his car one day when he pulled into David Kunkle’s place.
After saying “So, you collect milk bottles,” Haubner said Kunkle “goes over and gets this rickety ladder,” climbs into the loft of his barn and returns with a wood-and-steel milk crate and gave him a quart, pint and half-pint, along with caps from Kunkle Jersey Dairy bottles and said “this ought to get you started.”
Gravenkemper had a similar experience with his beloved Locust Grove Dairy bottles. Having set up at the Clark County Flea Market with his wife for years, where they largely sold baked goods but occasionally bought bottles, one of their regular customers invited Gravenkemper over to see bottles he had.
“He met me at the door with this quart bottle, it said Locust Grove Farm, Elden C. Crabill,” Gravenkemper said.
Although the man didn’t want to part with it, when Gravenkemper said, “It’ll never be sold as long as I’m alive,” the man decided to surrender it for just $5.
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Soldner said one of the biggest surprises he’s had in his brief career in collecting “is the prices the bottles bring.”
Used to spending $5-10 at first, Solder said he’s seen bottles go for more than $1,000 on Internet auctions. Soldner says prices rise when “you’ve got a rare bottle and two stubborn people.”
Gravenkemper said things get particularly competitive “if there are family members” involved.
Occasionally acting as a bidder for a friend of his, following one auction, “I got an e-mail from someone asking if I was a family member,” he said.
At a national convention some years back, Haubner found himself cowed when a bidder spent $5,200 on an antique milk bottle.
The buyer actually specialized in fruit jar collecting, Haubner said.
“With fruit jar collectors, there’s no limit,” he said.
Added Gravenkemper, “They’re crazier than us.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.