Well, I’m finally getting close to caught up! I’m in the not so distant past of the
significant Seekonk Bottle Dig. For
years the club has wanted to go on a group dig, and we finally got the chance
to. While we didn’t find anything
spectacular, it was great seeing a bunch of diggers together. Well, ok, perhaps I did find something…
I decided to make a second trip to the site, and of course
my day off was rainy. I weathered
through it (literally), and dug. A
lot. I found the expected milks and some
RI sodas, then a pleasant surprise. Old
bottles! I had gone from the 1930s to
1880s in a few scrapes of my clam rake.
An aqua medicine fell at my feet, and wiping it off I was at a temporary
loss of words. In my hands was a
completely unknown 1870s RI patent medicine.
Leonard’s Electric Pain Lotion
Providence, RI. It had age, rarity,
and a super name. I gave it a few
well-deserved jumps of excitement and showed it to the landowner, who got a
kick out of the name. Needless to say,
it was quite a “shocking” discovery!
Even more recently was the Little Rhody Bottle Club’s spring
show down in Richmond, RI. I
was happy to see four newcomers set up.
They made some cash, we had some good buys, and everyone was happy. For the price of $1, I picked up a bottle
embossed Price & Co. While it may not seem like much, I had done
my homework, and knew the style matched that of similar bottles from Walter
Price of Westerly,
RI. It was an exciting discovery that I
knew Westerly collector David Smith didn’t
have.
I recently had the pleasure of meeting the newest member of
the Little Rhody Bottle Club, Leona. She
brought two boxes of soda bottles to the club meeting, which is impressive for
a beginning collector. While a little
beat up, I couldn’t pass up and unlisted Crystal
Beverages Providence, RI art deco soda.
Quite amusingly I would end up digging one of these in Seekonk a few
weeks later. Déjà vu again…
I usually don’t mention broken bottles, but one piqued my
curiosity. Any collector who’s dug in RI
a few times will undoubtedly come up with a Warwick Bottling Works.
Probably the most common RI soda bottle, they infest every dump from the
1920-30s era. In 1930, the company became the
Warwick Club Ginger Ale Co., which is even more common. There are quite a few variants out there
though, so I keep an eye open. When I
dug a broken slug plate to a quart sized example, I paused. The only quarts I knew of are simply marked
“W.B.W. Arctic, RI”. This one had the
whole name spelled out, and was definitely unlisted. It might not be that killer bottle everyone
wants, but now that I found a piece the hunt for a whole one is on!
Update: Since I wrote
this up for the blog I almost couldn’t believe it when I found one of these in
a friend’s collection! He had it out in
his shed so it was a cheap buy.
One of the neatest RI bottles from my recent huge bottle
haul (story on Antique-bottles.net) was a Wm.
E. Clarke Pharmacist Providence, RI.
These fairly scarce bottles are usually marked Hunt’s Remedy on the
sides, but this one was simply marked Clarke
on both sides. Research on the Little
Rhody website shows that Clarke took over Hunt’s Remedy in 1872. Judging by the crudity of the bottle, I
wouldn’t be surprised if this was a pre-Hunt’s Remedy era bottle. If so, that would make it the oldest version
known.
