D.B. Bottles?

[glasstracker]

I've been digging up some aqua beer/soda bottles lately. They appear to be handblown in a cup mold. They are heavy and lopsided. The glass is very unevenly distributed, and they are filled with air bubbles, stretch marks, and pot stones. There are no marks, but each one has initials on the bottom: "D.B." usually with a "92" or "93". I am assuming that is the date. They don't appear to be of a professional quality so I am assuming they were made locally in the Cape May area. Just posting and hope that someone comes across my description with some answers. Hey, you never know...

 

[surfaceone]

Hello Kirk,

Welcome to the Forum & thanks for bringing the DB's.

Julian Toulouse in his landmark book, Bottle Makers and Their Marks, attributes the mark to the DuBois Brewing Co, Pittsburgh, PA.

"This was a very large recognition mark
on the bottom of the bottle. The function
of such marks was to aid in sorting the
bottles. The marks would be very visi-
ble as the bottles emerged from the bottle-
washing machines, bottoms outward.

One known bottle carries the additional
lower heel-side wall marking: "18 N," in-
dicating that it was made in 1918 at the
Newark factory of the American Bottle
Co., at that time a subsidiary of the Owens
Bottle Co.

SOURCE: author's collection." Pg. 159

From.

From.

"During the summer of 2003, another landmark American brewery was deconstructed and hauled away. The DuBois Brewery had been erected by the Hahne family in 1897 to supply beer to a growing rural-industrial region of Pennsylvania. The enterprise consisted of an imposing set of buildings. Dominating the scene was, as in most cases, the brewery itself. An ornate three-story corner annex housed the plant offices and a locker/shower room on the north end. Just to the south sat the imposing brewhouse reaching nearly ninety feet into the air, which was topped with a flagpole right up until the complex was razed. Further south was attached a mechanical area housing a grains dryer and other equipment, followed by a racking room, engine room, and boiler house with chimney. Later added to this was a newer boiler house/power plant containing the taller chimney which carried the DuBois Brewing Co.’s name into the 21st century. Behind this sat a large two-story ice house, erected in 1919 in anticipation of expanding that area of the business during prohibition. Rounding out the complex were the stables (later a garage), the main office building with the brewery’s bierstube in the basement, and a bottling house.

When I first visited this place in the early eighties, the courtyard between these buildings was still paved with the original brick, and was inset with a railroad siding. Since paved over, the yard became the staging area for the demolition effort. The ice house came down first, followed by the stock house (to the rear of the brewhouse), with its cork-lined walls. I was intrigued to note their ingenious construction. They consisted of three separate brick walls flanking two air spaces which provided primary insulation for the storage cellars. Progress then moved around to the three story office/shower corner. After this was down came the most unexpected part of the project. During a work break, the entire brewhouse, now without support to the rear and one side, came crashing down without warning in a massive cloud of dust and confusion. Fortunately, no one was injured and work continued. The center of the structure was left intact while the focus moved to the older chimney. A crane with a steel plate fitted to the end of the boom was used to push in the chimney, foot by foot, from the top. As bricks cascaded through the boiler house roof, pigeons scattered through broken windows as they lost their longtime home. Once this phase was complete, the previously bypassed part of the building was demolished.

The crane was tall enough to reach the height of the old chimney, but the new one was another "story". The rubble of the entire building was piled upon itself and compacted to a height of 25 feet, and included an access ramp. The crane was driven up onto the pile and extended to its full height to begin work on the signature structure of the complex. On an absolutely gorgeous late summer day, curious onlookers and the media watched (from a safe distance) as the 125 foot terra cotta chimney was whittled off the DuBois skyline. Dust rose like ghostly bituminous smoke from the now-jagged shaft. The power house came down last, and the entire heap was carted to the landfill.

The smaller buildings remain. The bottling house contains a glass imprinting business which, interestingly enough, silkscreens beer glassware. The office building is an apartment house, and the stables are occupied by a garage door company. Behind where the brewery stood, along Main Street, is the Hahne mansion. Built of yellow brick and stained glass, it stands fully exposed for the first time in its history. The ground the brewery occupied is now a grassy plot, small enough to make you think that it never could have held that massive and magnificent building which once housed the company that produced its own "Budweiser" in defiance of Anheuser-Busch. Some of us, the souvenir hunters and others who watched that day, will always have one ragged brick to jog our memories." From.

 

[RED Matthews]

Interesting thread!! Hello glasstracker; when you say cup mold I assume you are talking about a
Dip Mold. The thing that concerns me is the lettering in the bottom. It would be almost impossible to cut the lettering in the bottom of a dip mold, so I have to assume that there is some sort of a seam line around the heel of the bottles. If is formed in dip mold or even a cup mold, there should also be a horizontal seam around the bottle where that edge was. This would make one assume that the shoulder section and the neck was free blown. All of these bottles seem to have a crown finish, which could have been a tooled applied finish. We need some analysis and description of the seam structure on the bottles. Thanks for the showing and thread. RED Matthews.

 

[AntiqueMeds]

the crown top was patented in 1892 so it seems unlikely that those are dates.
They would be very early examples if it is.

 

[RIBottleguy]

I found a reference to a [font="sans-serif, arial, helvetica, geneva"]D.B.MFG.CO., [/font]but there was no info on the company. It's probably not a glass factory trademark but a company trademark like Surfaceone suggested. Here's the site I use:
http://www.myinsulators.com/glass-factories/bottlemarks.html

 

[glasstracker]

A little bit more about the bottles: They are crown top, but very early, so I am assuming that they are tooled. The finish also looks very unprofessional and "goopy". The bottles are certainly not machine made. The only seams that the bottles have are vertical. There are no horizontal seems on the heel. The bottom is indented and looks freeblown now that I am looking at them closer. The two vertical seems travel through the neck into the finish, but not to the lip of the finish. They end just before the lip. The reason why I believe the numbers are dates is because they are all "92", "93", and one "94". The bottles also get progressively batter as the numbers progress. The 92s are very shoddy.

 

[cowseatmaize]

The glass is very unevenly distributed, and they are filled with air bubbles, stretch marks, and pot stones.

Obviously I can't see or hold them but your description sounds very much like one of the early machines. They produced bottles with all those qualities and were used mostly for soda and beer with crown tops.
I highly doubt they were dip mold with tooled lip. I'll bet under a good magnifier you will see the seams around the neck and up the sides.
The Owens machine had a few major improvements in a short time from about 1903-1906. He did have other patents in the machinery as well. It was by around 1909 that the machine as we know first came into wide spread use. Of coarse there have been many improvements since then as well.