I was recently browsing through the New Finds section of the
Little Rhody Bottle Club’s website, and while still fun to read, it was hard
not to notice there were no updates since 2002.
David Andrews has done a superb job with the website, but in the past few years had to deal with a number of important issues which limited the time he was able to put into the site. He still diligently adds new bottles to the site when he has the time. Since I have been rather “busy” digging, browsing shops, and perusing
ebay, I figured I’m finding enough new RI bottles to revive this blog. You probably found this from an email link, and
hopefully in the future it will be linked with the Little Rhody Bottle Club website.
When I decided to start this blog, I realized I had a significant
“backlog” of unlisted bottles, so I’ve decided to go through them and pick out
the highlights.
Back when I was homeschooled and in a 4-H club, I got one of
my first unlisted RI bottles. A mother
of a fellow homeschooling family gave me a few bottles they had found in the
wall of their 1890s house during a renovation.
One of these was a Knowlton’s
Pharmacy Olneyville, RI. I loved the
name and shape. I was even foolish
enough to put it through the dishwasher in an attempt to get out the stubborn
dirt. Well, thankfully it worked, and
David Andrews added it to the website two years ago.
Another addition was a yard sale find, and it goes in
another category altogether. I noticed
this 1970s bottle embossed Star City
Glass Co. Coventry, RI.
It was the only bottle marked from RI that I know of that was made in a
RI bottle-producing plant. It’s covered
with all of the employee’s names and their jobs, making it a great piece of
history. I’m not sure where it would go
online, but I’d start with Miscellaneous…
Another obscure niche of the RI bottle world involves dose
cups. There is one listed on the
website, and about 23 are known to exist.
I don’t have a true RI dose cup yet, but got pretty close. As a kid I visited Jan Boyer’s epic-sized bottle
yard sale. I came across a glass cup
embossed Rhode Island State Board of
Health. It’s definitely something
you don’t see everyday!
Another significant first was a nursing bottle. A lady gave me a Knapp Patent Vented Graduated Nursing Bottle Patd. 1869 at a summer
festival. It was missing most of the
lip, but I thought it was awesome. While
perusing Michael Polak’s bottle value guide, I was excited to see that the
Knapps were mentioned in his nursing bottle timeline. Drs. H. & A.M. Knapp of Providence, RI
patented the graduated nursing bottle.
This lead me on a quest to find an undamaged one, and eventually, I
found one on ebay. It was clear however,
while mine was aqua and apparently older.
So I now have both versions waiting to take their place in the
Miscellaneous section.
As a kid I loved to go to the Kinney
Azalea Gardens
in Kingston, RI. I
still enjoy the beautiful gardens and the many winding trails through an
amazing assortment of flowers. My
curious nature led me to discover a small farm dump on the outskirts of the
garden. A gardener had piled shards of
glass on a rock, and knowing the owner well, they let me scratch around out of
sight along the stone wall. After
finding the usual commons and ABM material, I found two nice RI bottles. One was a very rare A.H. Spicer Successor to Lewis & Spicer Westerly, RI. David Smith, the authority on Westerly bottles, had one in his collection, but it had
not made it to the website. A gardener
later complained about my mutilation of some roots, but it was worth finding
the second example known of a local medicine.
