Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| Vegetation Covering Objects At Low Tide. |
Do you see the bottle in the above picture? There is one. I noticed it as I walked along.
Below is the same area with the bottle flipped over to show the side that was not covered with vegetation.
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| Bottle Turned Over. |
I did a little bottle hunting the other day. I saw a lot of old broken bottles that I wish I had found before they were broken. Many were from the 1800s and had good embossing. Too bad that almost all of the good old bottles were broken.
One of my favorite bottle finds was covered with moss. It was in a sandy area without much moss, and it was the clump of green vegetation in the brown sand that gave its position away.
It can be difficult to tell the difference between a vegetation covered bottle, rock or lock, but sometimes you can tell just by the shape. Other times lightly touching it with a metal probe will quickly tell you. The sound of stone, wood and glass is easily identifiable.
Not far away was a virtual bottle graveyard. Again, mostly broken bottles. Very disappointing.
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| Just a Couple Shots At a Huge Area Covered With Broken Bottles. |
In those photos you can't even see the many broken necks and pieces. There must have been well over a hundred broken old bottles just laying on the surface.
Here are a couple blown bottles embossed SB🙴G Co. That would be the Streator Bottle and Glass Company, which opened in 1881. It merged with other glass houses to form the American Glass Co. in 1905. They made mostly beer bottles, which appears to be what the brown one is and maybe both, but also other kinds of bottles.
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| Two Blown SB & G Co. Bottles. |
The embossed company mark gives us a good starting date range for these bottles. I'm sure a little research on the SHA site would narrow the dates for these particular bottles down. The mold numbers would be one good indicator.
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| Embossed Bottoms of Same Bottles. |
Blown bottles will usually show bubbles in the glass, as shown below.
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| Bubble in Glass. |
Some bottles have more and bigger bubbles than others.
You can read a very informative history on the company by using the following link.
An 1892 Streator letterhead noted that
the company made “TURNED MOLD BOTTLES & LETTERED WARE in amber & light green
colors.”
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| Source: See SHA Streator link shown above. |
Notice the different types of top on the two bottles. The light green bottle has a crown top.
William Painter invented the crown bottle cap in 1892. Carbonated beverages were already popular by the 1880s. That fits in with the date range already determined.
Not only are bottles interesting artifacts but they can also be useful in dating a site and what went on there. There were a lot of beer bottles at this location, but also a variety of other types of bottles.
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It looks like some people are just discovering my old treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com site. It sure has a lot of posts on a real variety of topics.
I should also put these new bottles in my old Bottle Barn site.
Looks like a cool front has moved in. We'll get some bigger surf in a couple of days.
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| Source: MagicSeaWeed.com. |
Happy hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net