June is National Dairy Month!

Amherst’s logo, ‘The Book and Plow’, may not do justice to the town’s history of dairy farming. According to Carpenter and Morehouse’s History of the Town of Amherst (p 285), “The dairy industry in Amherst attained prominence at an early date. In the early 1840s it was the fourth town in the state in the amount of butter produced… The Amherst Cooperative Creamery association was organized June 1, 1882,” and in 1887 it moved into its new building, which still stands in a modified form at 150 Fearing Street.

The Amherst History Museum has a large collection of glass milk bottles from Amherst dairies, and a fuller account of contemporary dairy farms in our town may be found in the book, Harvesting History, (2010) by Sheila Rainford and Ruth Owen Jones.