This shard was from a privy that had 1840-50s stuff, this top looks even older and the cool thing is that scratched/etched into the glass is 1-3 1/2 I assume the volume of the contents? Any guesses?
This is my favorite spring water for eye-appeal. It is a whittled yellow quart Syracuse Springs Excelsior with a long neck and oversize drippy applied top. Some of the earlier examples have this, most have the normal plain-jane version.
Well you people sure put a lot of great effort into showing all these finishes in such elegantly pictured reality. I have collected a lot of illustrations of finishes with the intent of making a blog to represent them for the bottle collectors reference.. I haven't felt I had done enough to cover the scope. Your collective post really puts what I was planning to shame. I am sure there are thousands of variations, but no one has really made a book of them that I know about.
Thanks for all the good work - collectively you just make the FORUM use up a few hours each day - and perk my interest with your work. Clarence RED Matthews
Hi Caz (Mark) great post. Of all the lips in the post, my favorite one is yours with the 3 1/2 marked on it. I've only got a couple of bottles, and a brick that have numbers or initials scratched in to them, but none are nearly as good as your shard there. I see them as secret messages from 200 years ago. so random. Hope to see you soon some time
Hi guys, thanks for the input. Hey Bram, I know you must have some good crude tops to post! I have seen a few other early, early 1800s black glass bottles with words or numbers scratched into them. Sure was cheaper than having a mold made with embossing, and few bottles were embossed that early anyway.
Here's one I kinda forgot about,....I found it on top of an old stone wall in an early 1800's Irish settlement. It was 90% there, and one winter day I glued it back together....looked like kids had set it there for testing their stone throwing ability....All the shards were still where they landed pretty much, buried under a thick layer of moss.