Mystery of the Blue Rue and the Morton Mead

[jerrypev]

Years ago an old time collector told me there was a blue MA Rue Cranbury NJ bottle. Though none have materialized I've learned to expect anything. There's thousands, maybe millions of old bottles left in the ground so the possibilities are unlimited.
The closest thing I've found is the pictured blue soda, probably mineral water, my wife and I dug in Cranbury Township. Since no other blue bottle of it's age has been found in Cranbury Township I know of, could it be the Rue blue? Since there's no embossing we'll never know for sure.
A small size Wm Morton Co stoneware mead bottle was for many years only known from one piece found years ago. Last year a friend digging in Trenton found four of them together. Two were broken, two complete. He gave me the one pictured which has a chip on the lower back side but I'm not complaining.

 

[jerrypev]

The Wm Morton & Co stoneware mead bottle. The usual Morton or Morton and Richardson bottles are much larger and definitely more common.

 

[Jim]

One of my favorite things about collecting early local bottles is the very real possibility of previously unknown bottles or variants surfacing. We had a local bottler here, F.H. Wentz, who started bottling around 1872. The only bottles known from this bottler were lots of hutches and crown tops, but I KNEW there had to be an earlier style. The hutch didn't come about until the late 1870s, and of course crown tops were unheard of in the 70s and 80s.

A few years after I first decided that this "phantom bottle" had to exist, one of them turned up. My buddy and I were digging for milk bottles in a c. 1940 dump, and an F.H. Wentz aqua pony soda popped out. Sometimes, the last place you'd think something like that would be is where it somehow ended up.

That cobalt embossed Rue could very well be out there somewhere. I hope it is, and I hope you're the one who finds it. ~Jim