Did you know your bottle may be worthless?

[madman]

hey diggerboy ive seen the pix of your collection very nice!!!!! good luck on future diggs mike

 

[RazorsEdge]

[sm=lol.gif]Well i must say this lil post of mine got a big reaction!

 

[preditor]

For me its the thrill of digging something out of the ground that no one has seen in years and would never have been seen again if i had not taken the time to go out and look for it. as for what they are worth who cares anyway a bottle is like anything else its only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. i dig up more bottles i dont want than ones i do usually but i keep the ones i like, and either sell, give away or throw away the ones i dont. i love to display my bottles and admire them but looking for them is the fun part to me. But thats just my opinion thanks for listening to it.
Preditor[8D]

 

[ronvae]

I want to find old bottles when I dive, the older the better, but that is because I want to be the first person to touch it in 100 years. I wonder what the person was like who threw it in the lake? I wonder what they would think of me in my scuba gear, if they were happy, what kind of day they were having, if they had ever passed my grandfather on the street, etc...I don't care how rare a bottle is, or if it is worth anything, I just want it to be old. That having been said, I have a soda from about the 1940s that I absolutely love, because somebody drank the soda, put 1/4 of a treasure map inside, weighted it with a large nail, applied a unique, re-sealable cap, and dumped in the lake, where it sat for 60-70 years before I found it. I foam at the mouth trying to come up with an explanation for what possessed them. THAT having been said, most bottle-hunting dives I come up empty. But I have been outside, really, really, "IN" nature (the muck at the bottom of a lake is as natural as you can get), with a goal. Not finding stuff makes it more fun when I do find stuff. The search itself is the point. Nice thread, good topic.

 

[diggermeister]

It is great to be in touch with such well-spoken and enthusiastic people.
Baltbottles; wonderful post above! Your point on the 'changing nature' of one's collection was well taken.
And I heartly agree, there is little to compare with the thrill of discovery... [sm=lol.gif]

 

[Humabdos]

I go to a lot of garage sales and estate sales looking for old bottles, fruit jars, ect.
Last year at a neighborhood sale I ran across an old bottle collector. He had stopped digging and collecting 20 years ago. In weeding out some of his"worthless bottles to sell he used Hugh Clevelands Bottle Pricing Guide. ( has nice photos but as a price guide is worthless!) I bought about 20 "worthless" bottles from him. One of them was a mint Rem-Oil Remington UMC Powder solvent bottle listed in Hughs book page 130 at $3-$6.
Not long after that I saw one exactly like it sell for $73.00 on E-bay! I've seen it sell many times on E-bay for over $40. You got to be careful with those price guides!

Humabdos

 

[whiskeyman]

Yes..it sure would be nice to live where one could dig older bottles. I've only dug two pontilled bottles and both were unembossed aqua...
as for Historical flasks- dug the bottom half of a Pike's Peak. The only whole one I ever dug was an amber strapside with the anchor embossed upon one side....
I have dug one Drakes Plantation Bitters, 2 Doyles, several Hostetters & Atwoods & Siegerts, and a Browns Iron Bitters, thats it. This area just wasn't well populated enough for any of the older bottles to be readily found, although we were a town in 1856. There's some here, but probably under the older parts of town...ie..inaccessible.[]

 

[tristian bottle]

<<message removed by tristian bottle>>

 

[RazorsEdge]

hey ronvae i know what you mean about wondering what they were thinking.....its actually really funny, because, I posted something similar a while back....Heres the copy paste -

"I just started not long ago also....its the perfect hobby for me because i love finding junk....i always am fascinated about the history of stupid things Like the cars i find, and a boat i found in the river, embossed bricks bottles, etc....I always wonder, how did they get this way.....Imagine the feeling of the person who bought a brand new 1952 ford custom line as they drove it off the lot.....how did it turn from that to being upside down in a ditch with no engine and bullet holes? How those 100 year old paving bricks went from being a brand new road to having a single one of those bricks in the river buried on an island.....Don't you guys ever wonder about stuff like that? I know this may sound weird, but if I had one wish, I would wish i had the power to see the history of things....just touch that 52 ford and see what really did happen that made it end up there.....anyways, i guess im just weird"

PS - I hope somebody reads that because it took FOREVER to go back through my posts and find it! []

 

[whiskeyman]

RONVAE & RAZOR...my thoughts often wander too.
I also tend to have something else occur. This usually occurs when prowling around an abandoned home site...I slip back into the past momentarily...eerie feeling, to suddenly seem to be in a familar place and yet in an older time.

It only lasts a few fleeting moments, but it is a sensation I know well.

I guess it comes from being aware of how alone you are at that moment and how quiet the world seems...allowing you to take a step back and imagine how it was...