Within glass milk bottle collecting, there is a unique category: college bottles, as Dean Shippy calls them.
Many land-grant universities have their own dairy herds for educational and research purposes, bottling their milk for campus and community consumption. Shippy’s fascination with these bottles led to his collection of over 350 bottles.
The majority of his collection will hit the auction block May 10 for an in-person auction at the Heidlersburg Fire Hall in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Larry Swartz — the auctioneer who is handling the sale of Shippy’s collection — said the most valuable bottle he sold was the only known quart from a dairy close to Gettysburg that fetched $5,400. Other valuable bottles recently brought $2,900 and $3,200.
Dean Shippy stands with his collection in his "bottle room."
Shippy went to three different land-grant colleges, which sparked his interest in collecting college and university milk bottles.
The Michigan native got his undergraduate degree at Michigan State. He recalls glass milk bottles were in use while he was a student.
Later, Shippy got his master’s degree from the University of Delaware and his doctorate in agriculture and economics from Penn State University. Shippy spent 38 years at UD, teaching ag for 27 years and becoming associate dean of academic programs for the remaining years.
Shippy collected multiple milk bottles from each of his alma maters.
Not only do students at land-grant universities have hands-on learning and research with the dairy herd, the campus and community also benefit from the milk.
Some colleges, like Vassar, did not have their own dairy herd but contracted with a local dairy to put Vassar College on the milk bottles.
“It helped the local dairy and it helped the college,” said Shippy. “There’s a pretty good market for them, because anybody who graduated from that particular college would like to get the college name on a bottle.”
More college milk bottles.
Shippy said his University of Delaware bottle also has “Ag Experiment Station” and “Newark, Delaware” on the bottle in raised lettering.
“There’s two different prints on bottles: actual paint and then there’s what we call raised lettering bottles,” he said. “There’s no paint. When they manufactured the bottle at the glass company, they had a mold with the lettering on it.”
The older bottles from the turn of the 20th century have the raised lettering, typically making them more valuable.
“I think the oldest painted bottle I had was from the mid-1930s,” Shippy said. “By the 40s, they likely all had painted bottles then.”
Additionally, Shippy said during World War II they put “war slogans” on the bottles like “keep up the battle” or a picture of a battleship.
College and university bottles come in gallons, half-gallons, quarts, pints, half-pints, and even a little one called a gill, Shippy explained.
“Some of the smaller ones were used for cream,” he said. “Some of the pints were used in the dormitories at the university where the students would just drink their milk in the college dining hall.”
Some of the college bottles in Shippy's collection.
Shippy collected all the sizes but said the quarts are the most valuable.
His favorites from the collection include one from the University of Arkansas that has “a really nice emblem of a red razorback on it.”
He also has an unusual bottle from Ohio State University labeled with red paint that was not in use very long because OSU typically used glass-embossed bottles. His bottle from Norwich Dairy in Vermont with a picture of a horse on it is also a favorite.
Swartz said there are about 15 State College Creamery bottles and a few Bucknell University bottles in Shippy’s collection, a nice opportunity for alumni to get a unique piece of history.
Now retired and in his 80s, Shippy and his wife are thinking of downsizing from their four-bedroom house, which led him to contact Swartz to handle the sale of his college bottle collection.
“I have a family room in the basement where all these bottles were displayed, my bottle room,” he said. “When we move to a smaller location, I probably wouldn’t have room to take care of them there.”
The walls of the bottle room are covered in narrow shelves, “and then I had a little bead glued onto the shelves,” Shippy said. “So the bottles wouldn’t slide off in case of an earthquake or something.”
Shippy kept about 25 college bottles that are special to him. He kept ones from each of the universities he graduated from, as well as some special ones from his home state Delaware.
A few of Shippy's favorite bottles.
“Some of those bottles were duplicates, but another fellow and I did a research study on Delaware dairy,” he said. “There used to be about 300 dairies in Delaware, back in the old days before a lot of the processing equipment and homogenization and pasteurization and so forth. All you needed was three or four cows and a few glass bottles and you were in the dairy business. This was in the 1920s and 30s.”
Shippy is looking forward to the National Milk Bottle Collector’s Convention in early April in Gettysburg. He has been on the board of directors as well as various committees.
Last year, at the national convention, they presented Shippy with the Gallagher-Knipp Award named after two founders of National Milk Bottle Collector’s Convention and given “for significant leadership of NAMBC’s educational mission and furthering the hobby of dairy and milk bottle collection,” Shippy said.
Swartz said collectors all seem to find a niche they like to collect, but he doesn’t know of anyone else with a college/university collection as large as Shippy’s.
“Other collectors may focus on geographic areas, certain themes or pictures on bottles,” Swartz said. “Several collectors try to build a 50-state collection with a bottle from each state.”
In the 1950s, most land-grant universities switched to plastic or cardboard cartons to get their milk to consumers. Nowadays, collectors enjoy the glass college bottles as a unique slice of nostalgia.
Click here for more information on the college milk bottles auction.
