Lake of Bays Beverages - acl soda bottle

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RCO

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That sounds like a long way to ship soda in those days. I imagine that there was probably a bottling facility in town, likely not a very big one though. If their distribution was small, which it sounded like it was, they wouldn't have needed a very large facility.

the business was likely seasonal though , they likely didn't even sell any product during the winters or very little , its the summers that are busy in that area , busy enough to justify additional bottlers . although shipping empty bottles all the way to Toronto does seem too far

from what I read about other Huntsville bottlers such as the ones which existed in the 1910-20's operated out of small buildings or basements downtown . but those spaces would seem too small for this company

they would of needed something bigger

I also don't think that I've ever seen a wooden crate from this company , you think one would exist , certainly would of existed at some point in time
 

CanadianBottles

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Yeah that's a good point about the seasonality, though I'm not sure I see any justification in creating a separate brand for the Muskoka region, typically it would make better business sense to expand one's own brand which vacationers would be more used to anyway. I'm not sure how small the winter populations in these towns would be, but I suspect that it would be large enough to sustain a small bottler. In those days they didn't need a particularly large population to be viable. North Ontario had a huge number of bottlers, after all, and not very many people.
As for wood crates, they can be really hard to find even for companies with a lot more bottles than this one. Since this is evidently quite a rare bottle I wouldn't expect you to find a crate at all, since bottles are usually much more common than crates.
 

RCO

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Yeah that's a good point about the seasonality, though I'm not sure I see any justification in creating a separate brand for the Muskoka region, typically it would make better business sense to expand one's own brand which vacationers would be more used to anyway. I'm not sure how small the winter populations in these towns would be, but I suspect that it would be large enough to sustain a small bottler. In those days they didn't need a particularly large population to be viable. North Ontario had a huge number of bottlers, after all, and not very many people.
As for wood crates, they can be really hard to find even for companies with a lot more bottles than this one. Since this is evidently quite a rare bottle I wouldn't expect you to find a crate at all, since bottles are usually much more common than crates.



I'm not sure why they would of created a separate brand either , but in the Huntsville area specifically bottling only seemed to occur during times when the economy was booming and tourism numbers had risen , there were bottlers in the pre WW1 period , the 20's and this bottler in the period after WW2 ( but no bottlers during WW1 , the 30's or WW2 )


there would of been winter populations big enough to support bottlers in Huntsville but I'm not sure how popular this brand was . think coca cola would of been more popular and Brown's beverages ( makers of muskoka dry ginger ale ) also served that area , they were the dominate bottler in muskoka area for years


I heard a story that when this bottler closed , the bottles / crates were all thrown in a lake . the story came from a credible person so perhaps it really happened but the lake they were tossed into is so full of sawmill and logging debris it be highly unlikely to ever recover any bottles worth keeping as the acl wouldn't of survived and crates long since rooted
 

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