It’s shortly after sunrise on a summer morning in 1938. There’s not much traffic on the streets of the Twin Cities at this early hour, so the clip-clop of the milk wagon horse is all that’s heard.

It’s a sound that has been heard for many decades, and it may seem unusual that horses were still on the L-A streets when truck delivery and other motorized transportation had replaced nearly all other horse-drawn activity.

Why would the H.P. Hood & Sons Co. cling to the system of milk wagons pulled by a horse? By 1938, autos and trucks were everywhere, and horses were seldom seen except in the fields and gardens of area farms.

A.S. Webster, who was manager of the local Hood’s operation, had the obvious answer.

“Because the use of horses is cheaper on the short hauls,” he said in a Lewiston Evening Journal agricultural column from May 18, 1938.

Webster told the reporter the H.P. Hood dairy company tried out motorized delivery in Boston and other cities in the region, but they returned to the horse-drawn wagon.

At the stables on Turner Street, Auburn, the Hood Co. had 16 horses and a dozen trucks. The newspaper writer quickly noticed when he visited the stable that the horses enjoyed affection and respect that the motorized trucks would never earn.

The daily routine began around 1:30 a.m. at the stable. Each driver harnessed his horse to the delivery wagon and headed for the plant on Minot Avenue. There, the wagon was loaded and away the outfit went, maybe to New Auburn, maybe to Lewiston, maybe to urban Auburn. Nobody was seen on the streets, except a policeman once in a while.

An executive of the dairy company told the reporter he had started with the firm as a wagon driver.

“It’s a lonely job this early in the morning,” he said. “Later I drove a truck and I was more tired after driving the truck than handling my horse.”

He said there’s a real friendship between salesman and horse.

“Suppose I should say to the truck, ‘you start on and meet me around the corner?’ Where would it go and where would it stop? I say to my horse, ‘I’ll cut through the alley and leave two bottles of milk and a pint of cream; meet you around the corner at the Jones house.’ My horse will be there waiting for me,” he said.

It doesn’t take much training for the horses to learn a route. The story recalled a time when a local horse was taken off a Lewiston route and put into Auburn. After many months, the horse was needed again in Lewiston, and on the first day it made the route perfectly, “neglecting only the new customers.”

About eight in the morning the horse looks for his breakfast. He has been fed hay and grain at midnight. Now he wants some more and he knows the exact place on the route where he gets it. He won’t go any farther until the driver puts on his nose bag with the good supply of grain. At a certain place he gets a drink of water.

“It may be divulging a secret,” the reporter said, “but there is a local policeman who shares his breakfast with the milk horse. He gives his four-footed friend half his doughnuts. The horse knows him and looks for him every day.”

Though other delivery business had become motorized by 1938, H.P. Hood still used horses in all the cities in New England where it operated. A large photo accompanied the newspaper story. It showed the Auburn stable’s 16 horses lined up with each driver holding his horse’s halter. Those drivers and the horses were Leon Records and Ted; Emile Ploude, Billy; Earle Elchick, Dolly; Myron Campbell, Peanut; Euclyde Hemond, Tom; Joe Bergeron, Prince; Coleman Benn, Dan; Carl Estes, Goldie; Stanley Ames, Chub; Edgar Sturtevant, Black; Ollie Dufresne, Queenie; Jack Turner, Blackie; Elmer Sleeper, Dora; Charles Sanborn, Dick; and Stanley King, Harry.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached by sending email to dasargent607@gmail.com.