1800s Purple Kerosene Oil Lamp.

Jimmy Langford · Oct 3, 2021

Found this absolutely beautiful purple Kerosene lamp base today in a river-like creek. Have wiped it down with Clorox & alcohol, but haven’t washed it yet. It was in the part where the creek becomes rock bottom. How the heck did it survive! Like I said, this creek is like a river. It is wide, floods, and has currents. I want to return this to its former glory so I’ll have to find the right collar & burner. This will be a great display piece when all done.

klaatu · Oct 4, 2021

Wow, I really like that. Great looking piece in a great color as well. I've dug a handful like that over the years, but they were always snapped in two at the stem. I still amazes me that stuff like that can be pulled from a creek/river with little or no damage at all. Terrific find.

CanadianBottles · Oct 4, 2021

Wow that's a beauty! Definitely not a common find in that condition, besides being in the river it was pretty unusual for someone to throw that sort of thing out without it being broken first anyway. I wonder if it was tossed in more recently when someone was switching over to electric lighting. Would be great to restore it to functionality again! I wonder how interchangeable the collars and burners are for these things.

Jimmy Langford · Oct 4, 2021

CanadianBottles said:
Wow that's a beauty! Definitely not a common find in that condition, besides being in the river it was pretty unusual for someone to throw that sort of thing out without it being broken first anyway. I wonder if it was tossed in more recently when someone was switching over to electric lighting. Would be great to restore it to functionality again! I wonder how interchangeable the collars and burners are for these things.

My town first had a electric plant in the early 1900s. If I remember from the sanborn maps, some businesses were still using oil lights in the 1910s. Pretty much any developed place in American would have had electricity by 1920. So that’s 100 years being in the river. That would make since too because the lamp has around 25 years worth of purpling and you have to subtract many years because it was underwater and deprived of sunlight. So in the end, you really have 100 years worth of oxidation.

1800s Purple Kerosene Oil Lamp.

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Jimmy Langford

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