Milford History Online

Daylight saving time (or “savings time”) has its fans and its detractors but whichever you prefer, you can be grateful that at least everyone around you is on the same time. Believe it or not, for half the year throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, basically half of Milford was on one time and half on the other, leaving everyone in confusion. Writing in April of 1934, the Milford Cabinet lamented, “Milford, as far as anyone can see now, will struggle along on the worst mixture of time. Mail, trains, adjoining communities, and manufacturing plants on advanced time. Schools, churches, and lodges and most households on slow time. If anyone can think up a worst mixture, he wins the solid silver life preserver.” In Massachusetts, folks observed daylight saving time, so the clocks began to creep ahead across the border. While New Hampshire officially stayed in the standard time camp, Nashua, and some of the towns near the border — as well as most train schedules — began to adopt advanced time. “Bootleg daylight time,” some called it.

Everyone seemed to have an opinion on the issue. As the Cabinet observed in 1926, “Daylight time can start almost as many arguments, as many family and neighborhood rows, as such controversial subjects as evolution and prohibition.” No one liked having such “double time,” but opinion remained too divided for everyone to get on the same page — or clock, as it were. Six years later, the Cabinet reported that Milford was still in a time muddle — “One half of the stores adopted advanced time and the others remained on standard” that summer. It was not until April of 1936, having suffered through a decade of time chaos that Milford’s factories, churches, schools, and stores all agreed on observing daylight saving time. Residents agreed it was definitely about time they did.