Uxbridge Ontario druggist bottle on ebay

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RCO

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was flipping thru some new ebay listings and saw this druggist bottle , hadn't seen it before . it still has 1 day left and bidding initially started at $40 but has now reached $ 155

on the weekend I visited a bunch of antique stores , saw a lot of milk jugs , pop bottles and other various bottles for sale but don't recall seeing a single "town or city " embossed druggist bottle for sale in any of them , the supply seems to be very low and some are must be fairly hard to acquire

as for this bottle , Uxbridge is a small town north of Toronto , wouldn't of been that big when this bottle used , doesn't surprise me its fairly uncommon



uxbridge-druggist.jpguxbridge-druggist1.jpg

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/UXBRIDGE-ON...378855?hash=item1c9e16cda7:g:jxQAAOSwceNaWV8B
 

CanadianBottles

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That one looks like an early one. I don't often see Canadian druggist bottles with necks that long. And yeah they aren't easy to find in general, I haven't found an embossed druggist bottle at a price I wanted to pay in an antique store in ages. They're more common at shows but still generally not super easy to find. I would have thought that there would be more of the Toronto ones kicking around after all that digging on the waterfront though.
 

RCO

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That one looks like an early one. I don't often see Canadian druggist bottles with necks that long. And yeah they aren't easy to find in general, I haven't found an embossed druggist bottle at a price I wanted to pay in an antique store in ages. They're more common at shows but still generally not super easy to find. I would have thought that there would be more of the Toronto ones kicking around after all that digging on the waterfront though.

the seller seems to think its 1880's so it is older

there does seem to be a lot more druggist bottles at bottle shows , can recall seeing some at the Toronto show , one seller I recall had some boxes on a table , that were mostly all small druggist bottles , but I think most were from Hamilton or Toronto

I've only been seeing the odd druggist bottle at antique malls and some of the ones from smaller towns or cities you really never see for sale here , sometimes they appear on ebay though , have been seeing the odd one there
 

RCO

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before Christmas at an antique mall south of here , I recall seeing a small /paper label druggist bottle from arnprior Ontario, likely from 40's or 50's ,

it wasn't in great condition and seem to recall they wanted $25 for it which seemed really high , don't know if its still there or not , but I didn't buy it
 

CanadianBottles

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Yeah I'd agree with that time period.

It's been a while since I've seen enough embossed druggists to fill boxes at a show but the Toronto ones are probably because of the waterfront digs. I did find a nice 1890s patent med with a druggist label on it from St-Jean-Sur-Richelieu and a pictorial embossed Halifax druggist at the last Montreal show for only five bucks each so that was a really nice find, but on the whole I found it fairly lacking in druggist bottles.

And yeah $25 for a labelled mid-century druggist bottle is almost always unreasonable unless there's something very unusual about it. It's definitely not worth it for the Almonte bottle. I picked up a couple of labeled Almonte druggists from that era at a flea market in Ottawa years back. Not sure what I paid but nowhere near $25.
 

mctaggart67

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A.D. Weeks was in business at Uxbridge from as early as 1857 until the mid-1890s, so, yes, the listed bottle is an older one, with the 1880s being a fair estimate. The price is now at just about $200, which is extraordinary for an Ontario bottle of its type. However, I must confess that after over 35 years of collecting Canadian drugstore bottles, this is the first one in that great condition I've seen from Weeks. I wouldn't let whatever final price it gets as being a standard-setter. Auctions can get crazy when two or more bidders get into a dog fight, especially when those bidders are seasoned collectors who, because they already got so, so much on their shelves, they go overboard for something they want because it's "new" to them and thus $50-$100 over typical market price is justifiable. After all, if you had nearly everything in whatever category you had and were consequently adding new pieces a couple of times a year, if that, what really is the difference between $100 and $200 when you consider how much you're spending annually?
 

RCO

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it says it sold for $205 , seems high to me , perhaps a local collector from that area wanted it or a more established collector wanted one for collection .

the Uxbridge area hasn't been as altered as places closer to Toronto , it would seem to me that there'd still be a lot of old farms with potential dumps or such if someone poked around

maybe its me but it seems like there isn't as many diggers as there used to be and more older established collectors looking to buy bottles
 

CanadianBottles

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A.D. Weeks was in business at Uxbridge from as early as 1857 until the mid-1890s, so, yes, the listed bottle is an older one, with the 1880s being a fair estimate. The price is now at just about $200, which is extraordinary for an Ontario bottle of its type. However, I must confess that after over 35 years of collecting Canadian drugstore bottles, this is the first one in that great condition I've seen from Weeks. I wouldn't let whatever final price it gets as being a standard-setter. Auctions can get crazy when two or more bidders get into a dog fight, especially when those bidders are seasoned collectors who, because they already got so, so much on their shelves, they go overboard for something they want because it's "new" to them and thus $50-$100 over typical market price is justifiable. After all, if you had nearly everything in whatever category you had and were consequently adding new pieces a couple of times a year, if that, what really is the difference between $100 and $200 when you consider how much you're spending annually?

Wow he was quite long-lasted, I was thinking that it was going to turn out to be some small druggist who only operated for a couple years. Do you see these ones turn up often? I don't remember ever seeing a druggist bottle like that from my area go for anywhere near that much.
 

CanadianBottles

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the Uxbridge area hasn't been as altered as places closer to Toronto , it would seem to me that there'd still be a lot of old farms with potential dumps or such if someone poked around

maybe its me but it seems like there isn't as many diggers as there used to be and more older established collectors looking to buy bottles

Yeah the digging heyday was in the 70s, so now that we're forty plus years on from that the original diggers are getting up there in age. There definitely still are plenty of active diggers out there because I see their tailings piles, but I don't know if they're really organized into a community the way the older generation was. Dump digging isn't as easy as it used to be with the remaining good dumps usually heavily off limits. I don't know if anyone in this area is doing any privy digging, it's always interested me but I wouldn't know how to begin doing it safely without someone experienced to help.
 

RCO

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Yeah the digging heyday was in the 70s, so now that we're forty plus years on from that the original diggers are getting up there in age. There definitely still are plenty of active diggers out there because I see their tailings piles, but I don't know if they're really organized into a community the way the older generation was. Dump digging isn't as easy as it used to be with the remaining good dumps usually heavily off limits. I don't know if anyone in this area is doing any privy digging, it's always interested me but I wouldn't know how to begin doing it safely without someone experienced to help.

most of the digging around here seems to take place on property being redeveloped or something along that line . and does seem to be some people digging at old farm sites and old dumps . but I don't know of any privy digging taking place in this part of Ontario or areas south of here .

the only active bottle club I know of is the Toronto one and not aware of them holding bottle digs in the wild or that sort of thing , they appear to have regular meetings and do a yearly show .

there were a lot of bottles being found along Toronto's waterfront but that seems to have quieted down , not sure if those dumps are still available or have condos on them now
 

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