Rainy day project...

[SAbottles]

and another, this for
Metcalf's Coca Wine
was one of a huge variety of wines with cocaine on the market. Everybody used to say that it would make you happy and it would also work as a medicinal treatment.

 

[SAbottles]

Yes indeedy :It's no wonder they were called, 'The Good Old Days'!!

From cradle to grave...

Everyone Was Stoned!!!

 

[SAbottles]

And it wasn't as if this was frowned on by society; in fact you couldn't get much better recommendation than this !!
Mariani wine (1875) was the most famous Coca wine of it's time.

Pope Leo XIII used to carry one bottle with him all the time.

He awarded Angelo Mariani (the producer) with a Vatican gold medal.

 

[JOETHECROW]

Some interesting old ad's Dale,...It's pretty much true. cradle to grave...almost everything we dig,...Whiskey, wines, Bitters & Meds....All were some sort of "high"...except maybe household cleaners...(I'll bet some of those even got sampled during prohibition...) Anyhow, you had me thinking about the last time I saw a "Mariani" bottle,...here's one we dug last June...

 

[SAbottles]

Hmm! Worse than sampling. We had a famous artist/eccentric called Helen Martins who created a house called the Owl House, much of it made from old bottles and weirdly shaped concrete structures. Sadly she committed suicide by drinking caustic soda. Ugh, brrrr. Pass the Mariani wine please !
It is a fascinating place to visit but there is a very strange & dark atmosphere hovering over the whole house.

 

[JOETHECROW]

Ach! What an awful way to go....[:'(] Went and checked it out...Here's a pic they showed of the Nativity scene, done w/ wine bottles.....Found it here: http://africanhistory.about.com/od/africanarts/ig/The-Owl-House/index.01.htm . I could see how the place might have a weird 'vibe'....Thanks for yet more interesting info.

 

[SAbottles]

Nice find, Joe. Gosh, looking at those photographs brings back memories of a trip there a few years ago, sadly before I acquired my digital camera. Helen Martin's full story is a strange and sad one. Once her father was sick & disabled, she kept him virtually a prisoner in a small room with walls painted black. (there was strong suspicion he had abused her as a child). All rather grim and reminiscent of the mountain people in "Deliverance" , but perhaps a bit more artistic. And no - I didn't pinch any of the bottles! In fact the people at the museum in nearby Graaf Reinet asked me if I had any of the 60s stubby beer bottles as they were doing some renovation work on the Owl House ! Had to explain that the dumps we dig were a bit too old for them!

Don't know if you have ever ventured into "modern" dumps ? When they were working on a Freeway some years back, they had to work through a 40s to 60s dump. We went to have a look, but they were using breathing aparatus because of the methane gas, which is a bit off putting!! There is also a very old part of the Drift Sands dump, early 1870s, but it's under 10 feet of compacted modern rubbish & plastic. We tried there once, but our digging forks just bounced off !!

 

[SAbottles]

You asked if I still dig. I'm embarassed to say that it's almost 2 years since I had my spade in the ground (other than in the garden!). On that occasion I got a lovely Holloway's pot lid out. Meant to get back to that spot - on railway property but no one seemed to mind us digging there - but when I drove past a few months ago, there is now a whopping great concrete bridge where the site was !! Part of all the development for the Soccer World Cup !
But I must admit that a-b.net and all the great photos and tales of digging have got the juices stirred up again - so you might just see an SAbottles post in the Recent Digging Finds one of these days!
Here's the Holloway's Lid :

 

[JOETHECROW]

Wow...,
Dale, I can relate to meaning to get back to a spot and having it be gone....In 1991, I was living outside the Buffalo NY area about an hour and a half from my current area, and driving back to visit my mother. Then, along a rural route about sundown, The large travel coffee that I'd been working on, started working on me,...[] I found a relatively okay area with only an old farmhouse down the road aways, to pull off and take care of business....just at the edge of the narrow shoulder of the road, was a small washout, that I noticed layers of really old looking glass, (found a pontiled bottom right there)..I remember thinking, as I got back in my vehicle, How ironic to stop at that particular little spot to pee, and have there be old buried glass there, and also, "Well, at least that spot's not going any where..." How wrong I was,...I had other large life events going on at that time period, and pretty much forgot about that incident,...About 7 or 8 years later, after I'd moved back here, I was working in that particular region, and riding in a company truck...As we passed that spot, there was an older gentleman and what looked like his son, digging there....It all came back to me, and I made a mental note to go check it out sometime...Fast forward to 2008. Lauren's now in my life, and wants to go dig some older glass,....I remember the spot. We go there. They straightened the curve there in the road,.....new blacktop right over the top of the old dump spot, new bridge, new guardrails,....same old farmhouse, but with wider lawn due to road project....For miles, the rest of the old road was the same as it ever was....[]

Moral?...Well I hope that young man I saw digging there got a helluva early bottle collection, and is still into collecting bottles and old glass, and, Hey, you can't get them all, but I could have made time to get that one, but didn't...No regrets, but I always wondered what came out of that little roadside pontil dump....Thanks for reading along on my ramble,....Nice potlid for sure,...we don't happen across too many of those, and great story about the Soccer World Cup location,...and how very bizzare about Helen Martin keeping her father in that small black room....Grim indeed.

 

[SAbottles]

Yup, continuing that "oh it'll be there to dig forever" theme, here are some shots of that "drift Sands" dump and a much younger me ! -
first a general view of part of the area with Table Mountain in the background. We used beach umbrellas to give us some shade as we dug :