67. Milk Bottle

This clear glass milk bottle was created for the Bethesda Farm Dairy in the 1920s. Produced by a semiautomatic press-and-blow machine, it is a one-quart bottle of a form standard until the 1930s. It is pressed with the dairy name and “M.E. Peake” for Millard Eldridge Peake, Sr. (1885-1959). With more than 300 farms, the dairy industry was a major part of the Montgomery County economy in the early-mid 20th century.

Although Millard Peake served as the motorcycle constable, or policeman, for Bethesda from before 1920 to 1922, it was presumably his work in dairy operations that led to his being chosen, along with most of the local businessmen, as an original director of the Bank of Bethesda in 1920. Described as a “prominent dairyman,” he owned, or at least managed, what may have been a single concern under two names: the Bethesda Dairy Company and the Bethesda Farm Dairy (per a 1928 ad). In a 1923 ad in the Washington Post, he invited “the delegates to the World’s Diary Council… [to] visit the largest and most modern dairy establishment in Montgomery County.” In 1930, the dairy was sold to the larger Chevy Chase Dairy, for whom Peake then worked. By the 1940s he was working for the Chestnut Farms Dairy in Washington D.C.

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