Old Mill Bottles

[Mrmark]

Hello everyone! My ancestral home sits on the site of an old New England mill built in 1855. It burnt in 1912 and was abandoned until my folks bought it. We discovered where the mill dump was located and I've collected around 250 bottles so far, and just scratching the surface. I would surmise that the first bottles I'm finding are no older than 1912 with some going to the 1890s. I'm guessing the deeper and farther back I dig, the older they will get. I picked up many just below the surface of the dump along with many different artifacts. I found a lot of Bromo bottles any many other types of bottles. I guess most are probably not real valuable, maybe around $5.00 each. In looking around the net, some seem to be worth $25-$45. But the value to me is that these antique artifacts are historical to the property of the home where I live. Part of my home was part of the mill and it's where I was born. My folks were blue-collar and built it all from scratch, scrounging building materials from here and there. I hope to communicate with some other diggers who could help me identify some of them, and learn something from you all. Thank you!

 

[CanadianBottles]

Welcome to the forum! Feel free to post some pictures on here and we should be able to identify most of them for you. 1890-1912 is a good timeframe for bottles.

 

[Mrmark]

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[CanadianBottles]

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Looks like the right type of bottles for 1890s-1910s. You probably already know this, but the five squat ones are inkwells, the ornate one is a refillable inkwell which would have probably sat permanently on a fancier desk, the others were sold with ink in them. The fancy refillable ones are much less common to find, especially in good condition, since they weren't intended to be disposable. The one with the frosted neck would have taken a glass stopper and was likely some sort of perfume or similar product. The small unembossed ones mostly can't be identified without a label or embossing, most often they held medicine but could have been any other product which would have been sold in small bottles.

 

[hemihampton]

Any Beer Bottles in there? Welcome to the site. LEON.

 

[Len]

Hi Mrmark,
Interesting bend in that spoon! Any maker's mark on it? ..I think you have a great sense of place not only regarding the historical mill artifacts but the family's Yankee heritage and your appreciatively strong familial bonds. ..What area of the Constitution State do you hail from? --CT Len