06/10/2026
Today on Art & Artifacts Wednesdays our subject is this milkman's bottle carrier.
I remember these exact shape bottles when they first came out, maybe the late 50's or early 60's in Edmonton. I also remember seeing a horse drawn milk-wagon on the north side of the city. The milkmen delivered all kinds of dairy products, butter, cottage cheese, milk and cream. We had a little door beside the back door where we put the empty milk bottles and plastic tokens my mother purchased from the milkmen for payment if we weren't home. Perhaps to ward off theft of all those quarters??? Pretty much everybody had those little doors on the back porch.
“We would love to know: does anyone remember milk delivery in Wabamun, Fallis, Seba Beach, or the surrounding district? Did a milkman come door to door, or did families buy milk from the store, a local farm, or keep their own cow?” How about eggs?
Here's a short history of Edmonton's past milk deliveries.
Home milk delivery in Edmonton goes back to before 1906. Edmonton City Dairy, founded in 1906, was the first to sell bottled milk in Edmonton. Before bottles became common in Western Canada around 1905, milk was often dipped from a container into the customer’s own pail or jug. The glass bottles were sealed with paper caps.
By the 1930s, Edmonton had many small dairies. The Royal Alberta Museum notes that Edmonton had 36 milk dealers in 1935, but by 1955 the business had consolidated into only four large firms: Edmonton City Dairy / Silverwood’s, Woodland / Palm Dairy, Jasper Dairy, and the Northern Alberta Dairy Pool. Bob Snyder’s dairy research lists 134 Edmonton dairies operating from 1905 to 1955.
In the 1950s, some Edmonton milk was still delivered by horse and wagon; Silverwood’s continued horse-drawn delivery well into that decade. By the 1960s, many homes still had “milk chutes” near the back door, but delivery was slowly being replaced by grocery stores, refrigerators, cardboard cartons, and later plastic jugs.
Milk delivery did not end all at once. It declined gradually. Edmonton’s last milkman, Barry Svederus, made his final run in 2012. When he started roughly 34 years earlier, around the late 1970s, there were still about 200 milkmen making home deliveries in Edmonton.
As for price, Statistics Canada gives a useful benchmark: in 1960, milk cost about 24 cents per quart in Canada. That would make four quarts about 96 cents, though the exact Edmonton delivered price may have varied by dairy and route.
