Kuner Bottle ID Help

[yoopermine]

Hi all,
I will preface by stating that I am a new member to this forum and appreciate any assistance as I am relatively new to bottle collecting.
I own and operate an historic Gold placer mine in the mountains of Colorado. My mine dates back to the mid-late 1800s and there are numerous decrepit cabin outposts hidden on my heavily wooded mountainside as well as at my base camp. I frequently and inadvertently unearth metal, brass, and copper artifacts from the old miners... most are unrecognizable to me and almost always a byproduct of overburden.
During one of my last visits this fall, before winter shut me down, I recovered the bottle pictured below. I have not had it professionally cleaned, nor have I attempted to do so myself. I was recovered under about 1ft of soil with the neck facing down and contained no moisture or significant water staining... surprisingly well preserved.
The reason I am posting it for ID in this thread was the criteria "if the mould seam goes through the lip it has been machine made and is after 1900".
As seen in the first image - the mould seam fades out (on both sides) approximately 1" before it reaches the crown. If I have posted this in the wrong topic category please forgive my ignorance. I have been unable to successfully identify this bottle using internet resources thus far. There was a company in Denver at one time names "Kuners" (plural) which bottles and canned vegetable products but this does not appear to be such a bottle. The bottle coloration is as it appears - light lavender or amethyst.
Thank you in advance for any information or advice. (sorry for the large pics!)

Seam termination

The mark

Lettering is raised and beveled

 

[botlguy]

Welcome to the forum. Hope you really get hooked on bottle collecting, you're in a perfect situation to enjoy it. When can I come visit? ;^ )
Your bottle definitely dates 1900 - 1920, probably closer to 1900. If the Denver KUNERS was doing business in that time frame I would assume that that is the source. Can not give you more being unfamiliar with your locale.

BTW, excellent pictures and presentation of your inquiry.

 

[surfaceone]

Hello yoopermine,

Welcome to A-BN and thanks for bringing the Kuner bottle. It's a local bottle and a semi historic Colorado glass house that made it.

"History:
Glass production started in Valverde, Colorado, a small village just southwest of Denver, about 1887. Bottles became the mainstay of the operation early on. The plan called for making window and plate glass as well, but bottles were in such high demand that they never got into the sheet glass business. In 1895, famous glassmaker, Robert Good Jr., arrived on scene to take up the glass business he had learned from his father in England and New York. Good rented the glass factory at Valverde and a year later, the R. Good operation was in full production with both insulators and bottles. Soon thereafter, William McLaughlin (of later California fame) came to work at the plant.

Disaster struck in the summer of 1899 when fire caused by a ruptured glass tank destroyed most of the plant. The plant was rebuilt late in '99, but the high cost of investment money precipitated a reorganization of the company as the "Western Flint Glass Company". WFG was prolific in its production of insulators as well as bottles. These items were shipped and used throughout the Rocky Mountain west.
In late 1900, the glass works was reorganized for the third and final time, this time as the "Western Glass Manufacturing Company". WGM was even more prolific than its forerunners, and a major factory expansion phase took place in 1904, more than doubling the available floor space. This expansion is well documented on the Sanborn maps of the period. Again, the major product was bottles, but the fast-growing telephone business gave them a huge market for insulators, particular the toll type, as well. WGM remained in operation until about mid-1909 when it could no longer compete with the new bottle forming machines used by most of the newer glass works. Declining profits during the last several years led the owners to cease operations. Apparently, the seven principals in the company were unwilling to make the necessary capital investment to modernize the plant in order to update the equipment to industry standards.

Notwithstanding their ever-increasing financial difficulties, WGM produced a major portion of the food, beer, wine, medicine, soda and water bottles used in Colorado and surrounding states. During its nine years of operation, it also produced the lion's share of the telephone insulators for both industry and long-line communications in the Rocky Mountain States. Even today, one still finds an occasional purple WGM toll on an isolated pole or perhaps half buried in the shifting sand in the back country of Colorado or New Mexico.

A fascinating side-bar to the history of WGM is that very little documentation and virtually no records from the business operations have been found to date. In fact, only two company letters with the original WGM letterhead have ever been found and these documents are located in the collections of the Colorado Historical Society in Denver. Thanks to these letters, we know the precise shape of the WGM logo, which I have redrawn for this article. The letterheads on record are black and white, so I've used some "authors license" in making the color red. Nevertheless, it is quite remarkable that for a major operation that produced and shipped thousands of tons of glass products all over the west for nearly a decade, so little documentation of the details survives!..

The Bottles:
The Western Glass Manufacturing Company's major product was glass bottles, and they supplied a vast number of bottles to the area's commercial industries. Bottles of every shape and description were made during the first decade of the 1900s. Many of the large food processors of the west depended on WGM to supply them with bottles for the canning of foodstuffs. WGM probably made more soda and beer bottles than anything else, but patent medicine bottles and various food containers, for example pickle bottles, were in wide distribution. The Kuner Company, a large Denver food processing and distribution outfit, bought thousands of clear glass bottles to package their wares in. Many of these bottles were embossed "KUNER" in large stick letters. A few of the beer bottles were made of amber glass, much the same color as modern beer bottles, but on the whole, WGM bottles were made of Manganese dioxide-laced clear glass. These clear bottles eventually turned various shades of purple of course, just like the insulators, but there are many more instances of finding non-purple glass as compared to finding clear insulators. One assumes most bottles, once used, ended in landfills where they were not irradiated by the sun. Many bottle dealers and collectors take the clear glass bottles and place them in "purpling boxes" for a month or so to bring out the purple colors. Strangely enough, there are no known examples of WGM insulators occurring in light aqua, blue aqua and amber although these colors do occur in the WGM bottles. This may indicate that there were actually two entirely different process operations at the plant and that even the glass tanks were separate. The trademark oval with a horizontal bar across the long axis (nicknamed "the belt buckle") was usually embossed on the bottom of each bottle to represent the logo depicted in this article. In rare cases, the embossing "W.G.M. Co." is actually embossed on the bases.

Conclusions:
So here we have the story about one of America's most prolific producers of glass insulators and bottles in the early part of the 20th Century! In essence, the economy of the Rocky Mountain States rested on the output of a small glass company in Valverde Colorado. Insulator collectors from around the world treasure the beautiful purple glass with the W.G.M. Co. embossing." From http://www.cjow.com/archive/article.php?month=6&a=06The%20Western%20Glass%20Manufacturing%20Company.htm&year=2001

 

[botlguy]

Well,,,,,,, there ya go! Can't get much / any better than that. Thanks Surfaceone, wish I'd said that. And I'm also an insulator collector.

 

[surfaceone]

Hey Jim,

Thanks.

 

[yoopermine]

ORIGINAL: botlguy

Welcome to the forum. Hope you really get hooked on bottle collecting, you're in a perfect situation to enjoy it. When can I come visit? ;^ )
Your bottle definitely dates 1900 - 1920, probably closer to 1900. If the Denver KUNERS was doing business in that time frame I would assume that that is the source. Can not give you more being unfamiliar with your locale.

BTW, excellent pictures and presentation of your inquiry.

Thank you very much for the nice welcome!
I am focused on Gold and mineral recovery at the mine... you are welcome to pick around for bottles at my operation this spring, summer, or fall. Just contact me prior if you (or others) are interested and I will forward a temporary (signed/dated) access lease allowing this activity and releasing my liability. My email address is listed in my profile. You may keep what you find in terms of bottles (Gold and minerals are off limit... on your own regarding artifact/relic laws)... I'd just like to see it and know where it came from. Hopefully I'll learn something! []

surfaceone,
I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to post that information and am humbled by your knowledge and generosity.
That was a fantastic read and EXACTLY what I was looking for! []

I'm finding that the study and collection of antique bottles is very interesting and DEEP... right up my alley.
I may be here for a while, winter is slow for me. Is there such a thing as "bottle fever"? [sm=tongue.gif]

Thank you for the great replies. This is a nice place and as a confirmed n00bie I am very grateful.

 

[surfaceone]

That was a fantastic read and EXACTLY what I was looking for!

I'm finding that the study and collection of antique bottles is very interesting and DEEP... right up my alley.
I may be here for a while, winter is slow for me. Is there such a thing as "bottle fever"?

Hey yoopermine,

My pleasure to be of some help. Yes, definitely there is such a thing as "bottle fever" and most of us in these parts have advanced cases of it. That nice sun colored Kuner may have been the ticket for you, too...