AndyR
Posts: 47
Joined: 1/8/2003
From: Conroe, Texas (but originally Massachusetts)
Status: offline
|
Well first of all, they would both are 20th century bottles by virtue of the screw caps. Automatic bottle-making machines (called ABM) replaced the blown-in-the-mold (BIM) process that made most of the cork-top bottles made in the second half of the nineteenth century. The fact that they are both the dark aqua color of Coke bottles suggest to me that they were made in the earlier part of the 20th century, since clear glass replaced aqua as the century wore on.
Now about the products they contained.
The Chattanooga Medicine Company of Tennessee started in 1879. They were well known for bartering services to farmers, like replacing the farmer' s barn roofs in exchange for having their products names advertised on the roof or the broad side of the barns. The company was best known for its McElree' s Wine of Cardui whose rights they purchased in 1882 from a Reverend McElree (who claimed to get the recipe from the Indians). It was an emmenagogue - a medicine for woman' s ills - and had a strong southern U.S. market. Lydia Pinkham' s Vegetable Compound and Dr. Pierce' s Favorite Prescription were the principal competitors in that field. Odds are good that' s what your bottle contained, although the Chattanooga Medicine Company made other products, too, like Zyrone, a dietary supplement, and Black Draught, a vegetable laxative (although I have only seen this as a powder on boxed form).
Your Miles Laboratories bottle could have contained any of a number of products which that company made. This comany is still going strong in the medicine field; we best know them for Bayer aspirin, but long ago, when the corporation was but a family enterprise, it was making such medicines as " Dr. Miles' Blood Restorative Plood Purifier," " Dr. Miles Heart Cure," " Dr. Miles Restorative Nervine," etc. The fact that your bottle has just the company name embossed in the glass and not the product name is certainly consistent with ABM bottles because the paper labels that were glued onto the broad flat sides carried the product specific information. So which medicine your bottle contained is impossible to say.
I have attached an image of one of the Miles bottles I found. I was at a playground on a drizzly day that happened to be my birthday long ago, getting ready to do some metal detecting. I noticed two huge dump trucks of dirt that were waiting to be used for regrading the playground. I noticed broken glass in the dirt piles, so naturally I started to poke around and found this perfect bottle that Mother Earth had yielded for me on my birthday! This is a BIM Miles bottle.
 Attachment (1)
< Message edited by AndyR -- 2/8/2003 12:33:35 PM >
|
Miles Laboratories Bottle & Chatanooga Medicine Company... - 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread