Milk Inspector Badge

Back in the good old days drinking a glass of milk could have fatal consequences. There are eleven microbes that can be found in milk and one of these can even survive Pasteurization. By the 1920’s most places in the U.S. with dairy farms authorized badge carrying milk inspectors. The badges they carried are scarce since even the larger agencies had relatively few inspectors that would carry out surprise inspections of each facility only three or four times a year. Illustrated here is a milk inspectors badge from Decatur, Illinois. It was made by the C.H. Hanson Co. of Chicago which made this badge some time in the late 1940’s.