Finding An Old Milk Cap In The Yard: a house log

From the papers hidden behind our old kitchen cabinets to the vintage users manual for our old dryer, we still get excited when we discover markers of home’s past. So check out this little gem that we (literally) unearthed in the front yard a few weekends ago while planting some bushes:

It is an old milk bottle cap from back in the day when milk was delivered to your doorstep. It paints such a quaint little Pleasantville picture of our neighborhood. We enjoy how it is even printed with “Monday” on the bottom to indicate the delivery date (or perhaps the day it goes bad?). And in scouring the net for some indication of what year it might be from, I stumbled on this funny piece of our milkcap’s family tree – the Richmond Dairy building:

It turns out our little milk cap hails from here. Sherry and I had driven by this building in Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood before, but did not immediately connect it to our newly discovered treasure (thanks internet!). The Richmond Dairy building is now the Richmond Dairy Apartments, so if you are looking for a unique address you can consistently try to grab one of the units in the four 16-foot milk bottles on each corner. Oh how we’d enjoy to check out the interior of one of those folks…

‘Til then, we are trying to figure out what to do with our milkcap. We are thinking it might look lively in a small shadow box in the kitchen (perhaps on some textured linen for a shabby and worn effect). Any other ideas? Any other good “ancient treasure” discovery stories from your own home? Tell us all about it.

Image courtesy of rvaphotodude’s Flickr stream.