Milk bottle caps recovered during a summer 2025 excavation at Michigan State University’s former Island School are offering evidence of everyday school life and the local dairy industry. The caps bear the name Heatherwood Farms, a Lansing-area dairy that may have supplied milk to the rural school during the mid-20th century.
The excavation was conducted by Michigan State University’s Campus Archaeology Program at a site that is now a farm field. The Island School opened in 1849 as Delhi’s Fractional District No. 1 school and was part of the history of the Holt School District. Students came from communities including Mason, East Lansing, Lansing and Holt.
Among the material recovered were milk bottle caps associated with Heatherwood Farms. The dairy was established in 1934 after Henry Crouse and local board members took over the business previously operated as Winan’s Dairies and Crouse’s Creamery. Heatherwood Farms introduced branded delivery trucks and sold products including pasteurized milk and cream, butter, cottage cheese, chocolate milk and ice cream. In 1943, the company bought the Holt Dairy Company.
That timing is consistent with the possibility that Heatherwood Farms delivered milk to the Island School, although the excavated caps alone do not establish exactly when they arrived at the site. Oral-history interviews conducted by earlier Campus Archaeology Program staff provide additional context. Lanny Reed recalled that the school had no cafeteria, and that students brought their lunches while a milkman delivered bottles of white or chocolate milk. He also remembered deliveries made by horse-drawn wagons.
The caps themselves feature “Heatherwood Farms,” the word “pasteurized,” a phone designation and the number 21306, along with an image of a bagpiper. The examples reflect the changing materials used for milk-bottle caps, including fiber and aluminum forms.
Milk caps were not only containers’ closures. They later became associated with the Milk Cap Cover game, a children’s pastime adapted from the Japanese game of Menko in which players stacked decorated caps and struck them with a heavier disk. The game helped make milk caps collectible, particularly during the 1980s.
For the Campus Archaeology Program, the finds connect a demolished local dairy—Heatherwood Farms was demolished in 1999—with the routines of students who ate lunch at the Island School. Their value lies in documenting ordinary objects and daily practices that are otherwise easily absent from the archaeological record.
