16. Toy Caboose

This red train caboose was made from a milk carton as a Boy Scout craft project, probably in Ashton in the 1950s. The donor, Eugenie Riggs, had four sons born between 1934 and 1946; the family moved from D.C. to Chevy Chase in 1936, and then in 1945 to Ashton, where she and her husband restored the historic house “Cherry Grove” (c.1773) on New Hampshire Avenue.

The body of the car is a wax-coated paper milk carton from the Lucerne dairy products line of the Safeway grocery stores. Safeway, a western U.S. chain, had established its east coast presence by purchasing grocery chains in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia in 1928.

Wooden-spool wheels on dowel axles are attached with heavy wire to the unpainted underside of the milk carton. The ladders, roof, and cupola are made of cardboard. It is painted in the red color often used for cabooses and marked “B-O” for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the nation’s first common-carrier. The B&O’s initial lines from Baltimore had skirted Montgomery County - on the north to the Potomac (1832) and on the east to Washington (1834); but it became the county’s railroad in 1873 when the “Metropolitan Branch” was opened, running diagonally northwest across the county from Washington to Point of Rocks.

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