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1930s Roberts Jersey Dairy one-pound Creamery Butter box from Utica, New York, printed in full color with fawn cows at a stream and a red-roofed farm. Never filled. š
5\" x 2 1/2\" ~ New Old Stock.
ā¦ SPECIFICATIONS
- Dairy as printed: Roberts Jersey Dairy, Pleasant St., Utica, N.Y.
- Printed: ONE POUND NET; CREAMERY BUTTER; the dairy\'s street address and a short local telephone number
- Size: about 5 x 2 1/2 inches folded; roughly 11 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches flat
- Material: coated cardboard, printed in full color
- Colors: navy, red-orange, yellow, green, fawn brown and cream
- Scene: two cows at a stream, a third grazing, red-roofed barn and farmhouse, autumn trees; end panel shows a single cow and a farmhouse
- Printer\'s mark: none
- Era: 1930s
ā¦ CONDITION
New Old Stock. Never filled or used. Photographed both folded into a box and opened flat.
ā¦ THE STORY
Jersey cattle come from the Channel Island of Jersey, where they were bred for butter, and their milk is famous for its butterfat. American breeders formed the American Jersey Cattle Club in 1868, the oldest dairy breed association in the country. A dairy that called itself a Jersey dairy was selling richness by name.
\"Creamery butter\" meant factory butter made from the cream of many farms, as opposed to \"dairy\" butter churned on one farm. New York led the way: the first butter factory opened at Wallkill in 1861, and in 1851 Jesse Williams started what is believed to be America\'s first cheese factory just north of Rome, in Utica\'s own Oneida County, turning out 100,000 pounds of cheese in its first year.
Utica was a canal and mill city. The Erie Canal arrived in 1825, two-thirds of working Uticans were in textiles in 1919, and the city peaked at 101,740 people in the 1930 census, a big market for hometown dairies delivering milk and butter by the pound.
The carton has the classic Eastern-pack pound-of-butter shape. In 1907 Swift and Company had the Elgin Butter Company cut butter into quarter-pound sticks, stacked two by two in a long square-ended box, and that shape is still the pound of butter sold east of the Rockies.
ā¦ GOOD FOR
- Dairy, creamery and milk bottle collectors
- Utica and Mohawk Valley history
- Farmhouse kitchen display
- Framing flat as advertising art
- A gift for a dairy farmer or Jersey breeder
