UnderMiner
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2020
- Messages
- 646
- Reaction score
- 1,501
- Points
- 93
I finally extracted the artifact and discovered it was a Victorian age ironstone soup tureen. The only damage was one of the handles was snapped off. I found the handle inside the bowl - meaning someone had likely intended to repair it, but as old ironstone was not in fashion by the 1920's they instead threw it away still wrapped in the newspaper they had wrapped it in - protecting it for a century under ground.
With the modern invention of Krazy Glue I repaired the broken handle in a way the previous owner couldn't have ever imagined, and put the bowl back to use to hold fruit on my table.
This is everything I found that day:
Included is a very interesting bottle, the brown Huebner beer bottle from Toledo has a joke written on the bottom - under "Contents 12 Fluid Ounces" it reads "Pure and without Drugs or Poison" this may sound like a serious claim to us imagining the backward nature of these old times, but it's not a serious claim, it's a joke. The "Pure and without Drugs or Poison" is a jab at the Temperance Movement who made absurd claims including that beer contained drugs and poison, which was widely understood to be complete nonsense and shoudn't be used be as an excuse to enact prohibition which hadn't been passed yet, but was getting close.
The metal cross with swords is a 1917 Croix de Guerre, if you ever needed proof that many WWI veterans threw away their medals after returning home look no further. This medal for bravery could only have ended up here if it was intentionally thrown away.
A soldier wearing a Croix de Guerre:
The ten pin bottle is an interesting piece as well, it is from the Carl H. Schwartz Central Park Mineral Spring.
In 1868 there was a natural spring that flowed in NYC's Central Park and a large wooden pavilion was built around it.
You could buy the water from this pavilion until the 1920's in these bottles which retained this same design for the entirety of its operations, starting with hand blown blob-top bottles and ending with the machined crown top pictured above.
The pavilion was demolished in the 1950's after serving as a candy and soda shop for 30 years after the spring water operation stopped.
The rectangular Nujol bottle was a health supplement made by Standard Oil. It was litterally just distilled crude oil that without a doubt was loaded with carcinogens. Sold for cheap it was snatched up by people on a budget in place of more expensive and safer health oils like Cod Liver Oil. I don't know how the 1906-founded FDA permitted the sale of Nujol through the first half of the 20th century, but it probably came down to bribes, and lots of them.
