Local Druggist Bottles from Kijiji

CanadianBottles · Jun 21, 2016

I just picked these up a little while ago from a guy selling off his collection on Kijiji (a site similar to Craigslist). They're all from Ottawa. Kijiji has gotten pretty good for bottles lately, I'm not sure if it was always like that or if I just lucked out by seeing some better posts right after they were posted. I just missed out on eight boxes of bottles dug out of one of the older city dumps during construction of a foundation, someone else snapped it up right away while I was at work. Of course now I'm imagining all the coloured local druggists that must have been in there (okay, probably not, but I know there was good stuff in there). I'm still pretty happy to have gotten these, it's not that easy to find pharmacy bottles from Eastern Ontario these days since almost all the antique stores in Ottawa closed down in the last year.

Norman W. Campbell and two Brownlee's.

J.A. Craig, Joseph Valiquette & Co, E.M. Ahearn. The Valiquette I'm quite happy to get even though it's got some damage, since I didn't previously know it existed and can't find any record of it online.

These are all Allen and Cochrane bottles. I think they were Ottawa's most successful chain of pharmacies for a few years. The smallest is my first half ounce embossed druggist bottle.

I'm still trying to get a pharmacy bottle from Eastern Ontario with French embossing (that shouldn't be too hard), a coloured Eastern Ontario druggist (that's quite a bit harder without going over my price limit), and a druggist bottle from one of the Ottawa suburbs before they were annexed (this one will likely be really difficult, I only know of one and it's a label-only).

RCO · Jun 21, 2016

know there is a lot of Ottawa druggists listed in the book , several pages I seem to think . I'm not really familiar with any of these bottles , its neat there all older and from Ottawa . and seem to be in good condition .

CanadianBottles · Jun 21, 2016

RCO said:
know there is a lot of Ottawa druggists listed in the book , several pages I seem to think . I'm not really familiar with any of these bottles , its neat there all older and from Ottawa . and seem to be in good condition .

Which book is that? The Ottawa druggist bottles don't seem to be very well documented. I know that Ottawa had a huge number of pharmacies though. The best reference I know of for them is the page on the bouteillesduquebec site http://bouteillesduquebec.ca/bouteilles__ottawa.htm but that is nowhere near a complete list. I'll send him a picture of the Valiquette bottle when I get a chance. I like how affordable Eastern Ontario bottles are, I don't think I've ever paid more than five dollars for one and I've gotten quite a few. I'm curious what other Eastern Ontario and Outaouais towns had embossed pharmacy bottles, I've only got them from Renfrew and Brockville, and label-only bottles from Kingston, Arnprior, and Lanark. I still don't think I've ever even seen a drug store bottle from the Quebec side of the river in person, though I've seen a few pictures of them. Outaouais bottles seem to be very difficult to find for some reason. I'm guessing that the Hull dump must never have been dug. I've never been able to figure out where the main Hull dump was. I think there are some small dumps which are now covered by parks but that doesn't seem like enough.

RCO · Jun 22, 2016

found the book online , not sure if there is any copies available , when I bought a copy of soda water book from same author I had to buy it thru him , my local library oddly enough has a copy of this book that's where I saw it .

The Ontario Drug Store and Druggist List (1851-1930)
by Glen C. Phillips, Iron Gate Publishing Co. 1989, 286 pages, ISBN 0-921818-02-5
http://www.ecbw.ca/canadian_publications/canadian_publications.html

RCO · Jun 22, 2016

haven't really seen a lot of Hull / Gatineau area bottles . not really sure why , not sure if the area was as populated back then as it is today . but its possible there hasn't been a lot of dumps dug or good places to dive for bottles in the city . you'd think there'd be some small dumps in the countryside in that area , still some farms and wooded areas not far from main city .

botlguy · Jun 22, 2016

Nice going, those are excellent finds.
Jim

CanadianBottles · Jun 22, 2016

RCO said:
haven't really seen a lot of Hull / Gatineau area bottles . not really sure why , not sure if the area was as populated back then as it is today . but its possible there hasn't been a lot of dumps dug or good places to dive for bottles in the city . you'd think there'd be some small dumps in the countryside in that area , still some farms and wooded areas not far from main city .

It wasn't as populated as much then as it is now but it was still fairly populated. The island of Hull and Wrightville were fairly densely populated going back around a hundred years, so that's around a third of the area of Ottawa at the time. I certainly haven't seen a third of the number of bottles that Ottawa has though.
It's hard to do research on Hull because the old Hull papers haven't been scanned to Google News and the old aerial photos from 1928 are really blurry and taken when the ground was covered in snow. There are a lot of places that could be dump sites, but it would take forever to explore them all. The two most likely ones are a massive homeless tent city (so I'm not exploring there) and a highway interchange. Both of those could also just be 1950's landfills, I'm not sure.

CanadianBottles · Jun 22, 2016

botlguy said:
Nice going, those are excellent finds.
Jim

Thanks! I see you collect 1/2 oz pharmacy bottles, do you have any from Canada? I don't see them very often but it turns out that there are at least three from Ottawa.

RCO · Jun 23, 2016

CanadianBottles said:
It wasn't as populated as much then as it is now but it was still fairly populated. The island of Hull and Wrightville were fairly densely populated going back around a hundred years, so that's around a third of the area of Ottawa at the time. I certainly haven't seen a third of the number of bottles that Ottawa has though.
It's hard to do research on Hull because the old Hull papers haven't been scanned to Google News and the old aerial photos from 1928 are really blurry and taken when the ground was covered in snow. There are a lot of places that could be dump sites, but it would take forever to explore them all. The two most likely ones are a massive homeless tent city (so I'm not exploring there) and a highway interchange. Both of those could also just be 1950's landfills, I'm not sure.

I haven't seen much of anything from Hull , haven't even seen many postcards from Hull , there is a lot of postcards from Ottawa but very few for Hull/Gatineau . old postcards can often show older views of buildings and places .

for the lack of bottles , it might be likely that some of the bigger dumps haven't been found or dug . there is likely bottles from Hull/Ottawa in dumps in the surrounding farms and towns in the area , they would of bought products from Ottawa and threw out the bottles . I wouldn't expect hull bottles to just be in Hull but a wider area .

have you ever seen any embossed druggist bottles from Pembroke ? its fairly close to Ottawa and downtown was very large at one point , it was a massive lumber town and key town in the region . I have seen many soda bottles from Pembroke but not sure I've seen any druggist . you think there'd be one

mctaggart67 · Jun 23, 2016

The author of The Ontario Drug Store and Druggist List, 1851-1930 occasionally hangs out at this forum. Here are two bottles from Dr. Valade's Ottawa pharmacy, one embossed in French and the other embossed in both of Canada's official languages.

Local Druggist Bottles from Kijiji

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