Thank you very much for the information, This confirms my previous research as far as the location goes. Thanks to all replies and here's to many more posts in the future!
I don't like the word "wrong", take it back.[]
Anyway, those styles have been used for things other than whiskey. They were used often for extracts and I'm sure other products as well.
That's a good looking turn of the last century bottle although not all that rare.
Back in the day, large bottle making companies had a selection of 'stock' bottles you could pick out from their catalog, order a certain amount, have them delivered and put whatever you wanted into them.. this is one of those. Only the original paper label could have identified the product which ultimately made its way into this flask. BTW I call 'em coffin flasks.. I don't get the shoo-fly thing..
Mason, welcome to the forum, nice find I like the coal mine angle. Look around there more, if that bottle dates to at least 1896 there may be some other goodies around. Have you metal detected near these coal sites? If that bottle glows under a black light it would probably turn purple in the sun. Good clean bottle and seductive shape. If yours held cleaning fluid like "carbon tet" I hoped ya rinsed it out good before the whisky was put back in!
Can't answer the shoo fly thing yet Charlie but I bet someone will know. However you're right this is a coffin and not a shoo fly as I just learned in this FOHBC article by Ralph Van Brocklin:
I have used the detector in some areas around it, not a whole lot though. I got it last winter and only recently got to go back to the site where we found the bottle (We camp in the same place every April) It is a hard area to detect however, the old railroad tracks were never removed so spikes and rails are about all you find, of course thats not a bad thing. Im going to do a closer sweep of the area next time i get the chance. Ill post results. I will also be detecting this weekend in an area where i found a small bottle dump full of screw on pepsi and 7ups from the 80s and 90s in hopes of finding some bottle caps and a few other items. I have high hopes of finding some older bottles in that area as well, Its a mining town that dates back to 1904.
Sometimes if ya walk parallel aways from the tracks you can find stuff flung from the train, most gets broke, but not all, I found a purty Phoenix old bourbon whiskey flask, amber in color up by Sonora, California just ten feet off some lumber co rr tracks