A good day for mid-century bottle diggers

[Stripeythecrab]

Since there was little snow on the ground and I'm home from classes until late January, my friend and I decided to go check out two new sites: the first was a former homestead that disappeared from property maps sometime between 1950 and 1960; the second was a mid-century dump my friend stumbled upon a few months prior. There are a ton of these sort of sites around our area.

It was still chilly and the soil was half frozen, but that didn't stop us from picking up the surface finds. The first site had a ton of bottles of all sizes, with a surprising amount of heavy-duty milk glass jars. We also picked up four different sizes of Whithall medicine bottles; a smaller Hi-Lex; two tiny green atomizer bottles (see patent here); a beautiful cobalt Noxzema bottle with the older square logo on the base; and a host of other things. (Including a bowling ball, but we didn't take it home. )







My friend found a rusted out bucket filled with horseshoes (about 20) all different sizes, types and age. Someone must have collected them and then thrown them away.

The second site is literally strewn with bottles and cans alike. The place was filled with cone top beer bottles () but they were all rusted beyond recognition (). There were dozens of bottles that we piled up, but did not take out of a lack of interest (more so space) but I picked out one milk glass jar embossed with "Tayton's" and an olive wine bottle embossed with "Ames Buchanan and Co. Ltd. Glasgow, Scotland" as well as two Old Quaker whiskey flasks (complete with cork-lined caps!), one by Owens-Illinois and the other by Fairmont Glass Corp. I neglected to take photos of these finds, but I'll update later.

So all in all, it was an excellent day for us bottle diggers, even if these finds were a little more modern that what we specialize in.

 

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[treblehunter]

Keep digging, from the other glass guys they say the older stuff is deeper below that stuff? I live in south Jersey, there always has been allot of those glass factories around me, Owens-Illinois and Whithall, are common glasshouses nearby. South Jersey has the largest natural sand deposits in the world, hence all the glass sand is here along with all the glass manufacturers.
One of these days I'm going to do a little bottle hunting, bottles are cool.

 

[pepperj]

Nice selection of glass, the art of digging is like a onion you peal away the layers to get the old.

 

[g-olden years]

Congrats on such a variety of colorful glass! Looking forward to what you guys dig up when ground thaws.

Horse shoes & bowling ball pretty funny. Andi

 

[PeteWmass]

do you know that you can take totally brown beer cans from the ground (cone tops being particularly good) - soak them in oxalic (or citric...but I like oxalic acid better) acid - and under the rust - much of the label will still remain - check out www.therustybunch.com - particularly the message board - they can give you all the info - Ive dug totally unreadable/lumpy/etc cans and they have turned out pretty good - certain cans are still worth a lot - even if semi-readable...check it out.....

 

[Stripeythecrab]

do you know that you can take totally brown beer cans from the ground (cone tops being particularly good) - soak them in oxalic (or citric...but I like oxalic acid better) acid - and under the rust - much of the label will still remain

Thank you, I'll have to try that out!