Fall 2004

The Lifeboat, the Milk Bottle,
and The Middle Passage
How one man's discovery opened a new world
and made connections with the old

By Debra Shore

Michael Durbin, foreground, with Marlow, Greta, and Joan (from left) at their favorite discovery zone, Harms Woods, where the milk bottle landed and the journey began. Photo by Kathy Richland.

	Photo by Inye Wokoma.

OUR STORY BEGINS WITH A SIMPLE AND GENEROUS ACT. On a Sunday morning in May, Michael Durbin was pulling garlic mustard with his family at Harms Woods Forest Preserve in Glenview, Illinois. Michael, his wife Joan Monnig, and their son Marlow, 8, and daughter Greta, 5, had been joining the volunteers of the North Branch Restoration Project for more than a year to cut brush, pull weeds, and collect seeds — the basic work of restoring habitat to the woods near their home. Joan, who homeschools the children, had learned about ecological restoration from other local homeschoolers on the Internet and began taking the kids out once or twice a month to learn about nature. Soon Michael, a financial software developer, joined them.

"It was something I read in Miracle Under the Oaks, I think," Durbin said, "that these restoration projects are building lifeboats for the planet. That whole idea resonated with Joan and me. We feel the earth has been wounded, and we're driven by the idea to do our part to maintain habitat. Plus," he said, "we all just enjoy being in the woods, and we like doing something on a regular basis with our kids that teaches them about something bigger than themselves."

On this given Sunday, site steward John Balaban, a teacher of math and physics at St. Ignatius High School in Chicago, asked Michael to clean up an area of broken bottles and debris. Not infrequently, people will find bottles fresh from a night's furtive partying. They also find older "junk" — from the site's prior habitation — that verges on the antique. The 160-acre tract known as Harms Woods, bisected by the North Branch of the Chicago River, had been purchased by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County some 80 years before. Part of it had been farmed or was used for pasture where cattle and horses had water and shade under the many varieties of oaks, maples, ash, hickories, and other abundant trees. Among the shards of broken glass in what may have been a garbage dump, Michael Durbin unearthed an old milk bottle with raised letters that read: "Property of and Filled by Johnson Dairy Company, Evanston, Il." "See what you can get for it on eBay," someone in the group suggested. Intrigued, Durbin decided to take it home, little knowing he had stumbled upon a precious link to the past.

At home, Durbin typed "Johnson Dairy Company + Evanston" into the Internet search engine Google, which immediately linked him to an essay by noted author Charles Johnson, circa July 2003, called "An American Milk Bottle." Johnson, who was born in Evanston, now lives in Seattle where he is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington. A cartoonist and author of numerous books (he won the National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage in 1990), Johnson was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1998. Middle Passage refers to the historic journey of the slave ships from Africa, carrying human cargo to America and returning with sugar, tobacco, or other products bound for Europe.

Durbin read Johnson's dramatic and affecting essay telling of his family's passage from Africa to South Carolina to Evanston, Illinois, where his great-uncle William founded a dairy company to deliver milk to blacks because no other company would. The story was larger than Durbin had ever expected.

Though most discoveries don't have such a clear historical payoff, volunteers often uncover plates and bits of porcelain, old drain tiles, even foundations of farm buildings. While the finds are rarely economically valuable, they testify to the rich and varied cultural history of our preserves.

From 1907 until 1926, for instance, a trolley line — still traceable, if you know where to look — ran through Harms Woods, bringing picnickers from Evanston and members and golf caddies to the Glen View Club. In the late 1930s, roughly 2,000 men lived in a Civilian Conservation Corps camp nearby while they dug the Skokie Lagoons.

Our forest preserves also carry records of another history. Just as the National Archive preserves the most precious foundational documents of our democracy, these places are repositories for the essential elements of our natural heritage: the genetic material — in plants, animals, and countless other organisms — of our Midwestern landscape.

After reading Johnson's essay, Michael Durbin sat back in awe. He had discovered a family heirloom. As if repatriating sacred ancestral bones, Durbin felt he must return the bottle to its rightful heir. "From his essay, I knew Charles Johnson had one milk bottle from the Johnson Dairy — a smaller, very scarred and cloudy bottle found in the walls of an old Evanston building," Durbin recalled. Contacting Johnson via e-mail, Durbin asked, "May I send you another? Quart-sized and in perfect condition?"

Within the hour he had a reply from an ecstatic Charles Johnson: "Yes, please!" Michael and Joan carefully wrapped and packed the bottle and shipped it off to Seattle, worrying for the next three days until they received word of its safe arrival at Johnson's home.

Charles Johnson with the two bottles from the Johnson Dairy Company he now owns. Photo by Inye Wokoma.   From "An American Milk Bottle" by Charles Johnson Under a glass globe in my living room, there is a remnant of my family's four centuries of history on the North American continent. I'm sure everyone who has visited my home must feel it is the strangest of heirlooms, an indecipherable piece of the American past, a tissue of time and forgotten lives. On it I often perform a private hermeneutics, peeling away its layers of meaning as one would a palimpsest. I try to imagine (as archaeologists do with tools from Pompeii or shards of pottery from the Incas) the African-American world of hope, struggle, heroism, and long-deferred possibilities that background this 80-year-old object. What rests mysteriously under glass is a thick, cloudy milk bottle, very scarred, that bears in relief the inscription "One Pint. This Bottle Property of and Filled by JOHNSON DAIRY CO., Evanston, Il. Wash and Return." The venerable Johnson who owned that bottle was my late, great-uncle William.... [Read the complete essay]

"We were just out there pulling garlic mustard," Durbin said, still sounding amazed weeks later.  "This discovery has enlightened us to a whole dimension of history, the migration of black Americans from the south to the north, the dairies that wouldn't serve blacks. It was just thrilling to connect with Charles Johnson because he was so excited about it and that was just infectious," says Durbin. "It just took us so much beyond garlic mustard."

John Balaban, the volunteer steward at Harms Woods, shared the story of the milk bottle with his colleagues at St. Ignatius, who teach Johnson's Middle Passage in an African-American studies course. The black student organization there also is called Middle Passage.

"And so I suppose our passages continue," Durbin says. "The milk bottle is home. Harms Woods has a new patch of soil for its next wildflower or sedge, and my family and I have yet another workday experience we won't soon forget."