{Sentinel}
Silver Member
On Saturday morning, I hooked up with my buddy Louis and we went down to this little spot that we had prospected for some bottles. It had been a few months since the last time and we marked off a new grid with fresh ground below, an area about 6 x 10 and we prepared to dig what would end up being a VERY TOUGH day of digging! To start off with the temperature at 6:30AM was already in the 80s and within a couple of hours was around 95! Next, as we busted open the ground, what was revealed to us was a ‘Brick Cap’ of about 2 1/2 feet thick. This was a task to break open in that scorching VA heat but after about an 1 ½ hours we were through it. We spent the next several hours digging down to about 6 ft and that is when we hit the original surface of the creek bed. It was meshed with broken glass, lime, and bottles! The bottles started flowing with almost every scoop of the shovel.
We were going to dig through another 2 feet of sand to another layer of bottles but the combination of near exhaustion and heat with the fact that we didn’t feel a whole lot of anything else below using the probe rod, led us to end the hunt and to back fill the hole which was a task in itself.
Most of these bottles were around the mid to1880s era with a few around the 1900 mark. Got quite alot of nice bottles with lettering and embossing on them including some medicines, sodas, whiskys....here's a small sample of some of them...take a look:
MOXIE'S 'NERVE FOOD'
"Baltimore"
NORFOLK BRANCH (1873-1890)...The "H" stands for Heurich...Christian Heurich, who owned a beer brewery and this bottle of course came from the...Norfolk Branch
Early "Lea & Perrin's" Worcester Sauce Bottle. Worcester Sauce was heavily copied by individual sutlers across the country at the time. Some of these others are very rare. I happened to get one of the copied Worcester Sauce bottles this dig as well
"COURTENAY & CO. Worcester Sauce" This bottle is a SCARCE find. This brand is a very hard brand to find. This is an example of a "copied" Lea & Perrins....Back then copyright infringement wasn't given much thought. dating from the mid 1880s...The bottle stands 7"tall,has a hand tooled cork top finish,is round in shape.The bottom is embossed with the letters "A & P".This is one of the many copycat versions of the ever popular Lea & Perrins Sauce bottles
Emerson Drug Co. Baltimore, MD
I was cleaning this one and all of a sudden I busted out laughing at this SCHLITZ antiquity
The earliest malt liquor bottle I have ever seen.. THE FIRST SCHLITZ MALT LIQUOR HAHA
"WHITTEMORE BOSTON"
THIS IS MY FAVORITE and it was sitting 6 FEET DEEP straight up. It is a BEAUTIFUL Earthenware Terra Cotta pot aka Spittoon. It has a nice red color and a great fern design on the front. I have ALL THE PIECES to the lip and once I have bonded it back together, this will make a TERRIFIC PIECE
"JOHNSONS LINIMENT"
And LAST but not least, here is a photo of all the bottles together..
These bottle were hard earned so I hope you guys liked all the pictures. I will be posting video of the dig to this thread too in the next couple hours.
VIDEO OF DIG (Forewarning: I believe the extreme heat on Saturday got to my DVR as you will notice that the videos have a certain watery or wobbly effect to them in certain parts of the clips however this doesnt take away from the clips):
Part I
[video=google;-891253528173825593]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-891253528173825593&hl=en[/video]
Part II
[video=google;3233867572201083149]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3233867572201083149&hl=en[/video]
Part III
[video=google;5610969134870181653]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5610969134870181653&hl=en[/video]
We were going to dig through another 2 feet of sand to another layer of bottles but the combination of near exhaustion and heat with the fact that we didn’t feel a whole lot of anything else below using the probe rod, led us to end the hunt and to back fill the hole which was a task in itself.
Most of these bottles were around the mid to1880s era with a few around the 1900 mark. Got quite alot of nice bottles with lettering and embossing on them including some medicines, sodas, whiskys....here's a small sample of some of them...take a look:
MOXIE'S 'NERVE FOOD'
"Baltimore"
NORFOLK BRANCH (1873-1890)...The "H" stands for Heurich...Christian Heurich, who owned a beer brewery and this bottle of course came from the...Norfolk Branch
Early "Lea & Perrin's" Worcester Sauce Bottle. Worcester Sauce was heavily copied by individual sutlers across the country at the time. Some of these others are very rare. I happened to get one of the copied Worcester Sauce bottles this dig as well
"COURTENAY & CO. Worcester Sauce" This bottle is a SCARCE find. This brand is a very hard brand to find. This is an example of a "copied" Lea & Perrins....Back then copyright infringement wasn't given much thought. dating from the mid 1880s...The bottle stands 7"tall,has a hand tooled cork top finish,is round in shape.The bottom is embossed with the letters "A & P".This is one of the many copycat versions of the ever popular Lea & Perrins Sauce bottles
Emerson Drug Co. Baltimore, MD
I was cleaning this one and all of a sudden I busted out laughing at this SCHLITZ antiquity
The earliest malt liquor bottle I have ever seen.. THE FIRST SCHLITZ MALT LIQUOR HAHA "WHITTEMORE BOSTON"
THIS IS MY FAVORITE and it was sitting 6 FEET DEEP straight up. It is a BEAUTIFUL Earthenware Terra Cotta pot aka Spittoon. It has a nice red color and a great fern design on the front. I have ALL THE PIECES to the lip and once I have bonded it back together, this will make a TERRIFIC PIECE
"JOHNSONS LINIMENT"
And LAST but not least, here is a photo of all the bottles together..
These bottle were hard earned so I hope you guys liked all the pictures. I will be posting video of the dig to this thread too in the next couple hours.
VIDEO OF DIG (Forewarning: I believe the extreme heat on Saturday got to my DVR as you will notice that the videos have a certain watery or wobbly effect to them in certain parts of the clips however this doesnt take away from the clips):
Part I
[video=google;-891253528173825593]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-891253528173825593&hl=en[/video]
Part II
[video=google;3233867572201083149]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3233867572201083149&hl=en[/video]
Part III
[video=google;5610969134870181653]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5610969134870181653&hl=en[/video]
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