By Marianne Dow — At one of our Findlay Bottle Club meetings, Jeff passed around a fruit jar that was a smooth-lip Mason's 1858, but in the familiar shade of aqua-ish blue of Ball fruit jars. It is conventional wisdom that all "Ball Blue"-colored jars were made by Ball (as no other fruit-jar maker has jars in this famous shade), so it stands to reason that this Mason's 1858 was also made by Ball. Why is only Ball glass that particular shade of blue? Jeff's answer —"It's all in the sand, baby!" Most of...

Bill Lindsey on How To Read a Bottle

By Maribeth Keane — My maternal grandfather and uncle got into bottles in about 1965 or ‘66 when I was in high school, and we started digging. My uncle was in Arizona, near some of the old mining camps there. Those were the glory days of bottle digging. People had access with four-wheel drive vehicles and gas was cheap and time-off was more abundant. Then years passed and people started really hitting the ghost towns and mining camps and logging camps of the West. Anyway, we started by digging some of the...

Collecting Antique Ball Jars

By Bruce Wayne Schank — One of the most common fruit jars ever produced is the lowly Ball jar. Historical figures show that from between Sept 1, 1894 until Dec 31, 1961, 41,256,856 Gross jars were produced by the Ball Glass Mfg Co. A staggering number, what this suggests is that Ball jars should be a readily available commodity and very easy to find, making collecting Ball Jars a somewhat easier venture since more of these jars exist then probably any of the other manufacturers combined. Yet with all that glass out...