Historical bottle.photos

[hemihampton]

another.

 

[CanadianBottles]

If you search through vintage logging photos, such as those images recorded by Darius Kinsey, you will occasionally see blob top bottles hanging on the side of a log being bucked or a tree being felled. I'm also pretty sure that I spotted such a saw lubricant bottle--they held kerosene that both dissolved pitch, which would cause drag, and lubricated the saw blade--sitting on the lower, flat surface of a huge undercut in which two loggers were posing, but can't recall if it was a blob top.

However, the bottles were not typically soda bottles as the loggers needed to carry a larger quantity of oil to get through a full day of cutting (bushelers* did not work six-hour shifts in those days). Typically, the loggers would bind a blacksmith-forged hook to the neck of a quart beer bottle, which enabled them to keep the lubricant nearby lodged into the bark of the tree. Avoiding pitch sap concentrated at the base of the tree, together with the large butt-swell of huge western timber, was the reason that so many historical photos picture the fallers perched on springboards, often eight or ten feet above the ground.

* See definition at http://www.puresimplicity.net/~heviarti/Logging_Terms.html

A saw oil bottle is visible in the photo below, though it looks more like a whiskey or other liquor bottle.

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The example below--I believe it is a reproduction in an interpretive forest (outdoor museum)--is only about pint size and its hook appears to be twisted wire, but it illustrates the practice:

View attachment 234793

That's really interesting, I didn't know about the oil bottles. Sometimes in BC I would come across a single smashed liquor bottle way out in the woods and was imagining some loggers downing a whole quart of whisky while on the job, but now I suspect that those were actually oil bottles.