Posted 8 years ago
AWhthd
(1 item)
Our city dug out our ditches..would say at least 3 feet down. This bottle was open end up about 1/2 inch down the neck (that was all you could see of it). and my 13 yr old son found it and dug it out. Has only an R molded in the glass. No clue what it was used for or how old. Any help would be appreciated but if you can't, I still think it is pretty neat!
Oh and I forgot...it is a minuture cork style bottle.
Need photo of bottom, and someone will know something I'm sure.
Cool find!
I don't have it with me right now, so I will take a pic when I get home. Thanks and my son was pretty excited about finding it.
I bet he was! I recently got an old bottle in a lot from an auction. I currently have a bid in the hundreds of dollars for it. But mine has a label, but yours is embossed.
I'm looking forward to the answers you will get here on CW, and welcome aboard!
Thank you and I can't wait to get home and look at the bottom.
Oh I am quite sure that this find is not worth hunderds of dollars. We aren't that lucky! LOL
I think most likely this would have been a sauce bottle.
Ok... can someone please tell me how to add the picture of the bottom of the bottle to this post? Honestly I do not see anything on the bottom. Just dirt in the bottom that I need to clean out. Didn't have time last night.
Also, the bottle is 3-1/2 inches tall.
Never mind on how to add the picture...I figured it out!
Try this website. It may help you date it, at least.
http://www.bottlebooks.com/basics.htm
Well, if it's small, I'd say it's a cologne or perfume. Looks like a typical early 1900s cologne.
There's likely more down there.
I can't say 100% but it has a flared rounded lip which it says 1830-1850. Also I see a mold seam down the sides but no concentric ring on the neck of the bottle but there is a ring going around the actual lip. And...I do not understand the Pontil (I think that is what it was called) at all. So far I can't find a picture of any bottle like this.
No, it has neither flared lip nor a pontil. I assure you, this isn't earlier than 1890s.
Your perfume is a typical shape and size for the 1890s-1910 period of blown-in-mold bottles. It is hand-tooled on the top to form the mouth. A flared lip on a pontiled bottle looks like this:
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/214831-1840s-bottle?in=79
Notice the thin, flat edge that makes up the lip.
A rounded lip is the total opposite and looks like this on a pontiled bottle:
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/221006-mid-1800s-labeled-bottle-open-pontil?in=79
While the rounded lip looks similar to a tooled lip, the rounded lip is worked from a flared lip into the rounded shape in a different method. Later tooling methods left the bottle with a nicer lip without the hassle.
Another thing that tells me yours is a lot newer than 1850, is the thickness of the glass. Smaller bottles back then tended to be much thinner. It was the bigger bottles that had to hold pressure that were thicker. Yours is a perfume, which wouldn't hold pressure. Later, glassmakers tended to blow everything to the same thickness.
The ring around the neck is likely from the hand-tooling, as they form the mouth by hand. Later everything went to machine-made in the 1910s.
As one who has studied bottles for several years, I am quite confident that yours is from about 1900 and is a perfume.
Oh and if you don't believe it's a perfume, here's a pic of one of the most common perfumes out there from the time, which has a very similar shape:
https://img0.etsystatic.com/002/0/6119175/il_570xN.353818992_jnxy.jpg
THANK YOU SO MUCH! I do believe you...I actually found the perfume bottle that you reference and it does look exactly like mine other than the embossing. You had said earlier that there were probably more in my yard...any idea's how to find out where the closest privy is or would they all be right in that area?
That it was 3 feet down suggests it may have been only a trash pit that this was found in, rather than a privy (some privies will go down as far as 20 feet). On YouTube you can look up Privy Probing, but that takes time to master. A local bottle club may be able to help you better. Just time in the name of your city or the largest city nearby and Bottle Club into Google and see if anything pops up.
Usually, where the ground is slumped in more than the rest around it, is a good place to start. But don't go tearing up the yard.
You can see if your city has accessible records. Insurance maps from the time might show where the outhouse was.
The size of the bottle would have helped.
I put it in a earlier post. It is 3-1/2 inches tall.
Thank you so much SpiritBear. I will do that. It was right at the edge close to the bottom of the where the city just dug out our ditch for drainage. It slops down 3 to 3-1/3 feet from our yard. All you could see was about the top 1/2", open end up of the bottle. It was filled to the rim with dirt as you can imagine. This has been very exciting.