what the biggest bottle collection you've seen?

[VTdigger]

I know there's hundreds of thousands of different kinds of old bottles, but what's the biggest personal collection you've ever seen or heard of?

 

[surfaceone]

Hey Jim,

I'd be reluctant to name anyone's personal collection, even if I knew of one. Well, there's Ferd. He's prolly got one hell of an alarm system.

Otherwise, I like the Corning Museum.

 

[BRIAN S.]

My late Grandfather ...... I never counted his bottles ( he had 100 Demijohns alone in his collection , and 700 or so kerosene and whale oil lamps ) ........ But it was unbelievable the amount of bottles he had dug , traded for, and bought over his lifetime .

 

[NYCFlasks]

I purchased a collection some years back, it filled a two car garage from the floor to the ceiling joists, from the doors to the rear wall. The late owner would pick up furniture from the roadside, and fill the drawers with the bottles, stacked in the drawers like cord wood. The furniture was placed one on top of the other and boxes filled the odd spaces. There were also 2 55 gallon drums filled with insulators. The deal was I had to take everything.
Required 9 trips with a rack body truck, not a pick up, to get it all to my home. Took 2 weekends to move all of it.
When I loaded the last load, and reached the window, the wife said to me " I have not seen that window in 30 years".
I figure that I recycled 8 loads worth, and kept one, which I have been selling and swapping for a good 15 years now.
While I do not know how many bottles there were, it was by far the largest amount of bottles I have ever seen collected in one place, by one person in my nearly 40 years in this hobby. Fellow dug for decades, and kept EVERYTHING he dug.
Only bottle she kept, was a Casper's Whiskey.............

 

[peejrey]

Here's a big one for all you Anchor Hocking Glass Co.
http://www.anchorhockingmuseum.com/History%20of%20Museum.html
Lots of glassware towards the bottom..

 

[LC]

Back in the seventies , there was a guy locally that worked for Foley construction in Cincinnati . He ran a front end loader . He did a tremendous amount of work on the river front area of Cincinnati at that time . Seemed back then , they were digging into dump after dump as well as privies, more or less the cream of the crop for Cincy . His oiler would pick up bottles for him as they came out of the ground and many of the other workers would retreive bottles and sell them to him . He had hundreds of bottles , all good stuff . Had a huge collection of Cincy sodas as well as the beers , as well as all other varieties of bottles that were dug out of the ground . Best collection I had ever seen in my years of collecting .

 

[Road Dog]

I've seen a collection of 10,000. This fella had pontil stuff mostly (meds and sodas) . Some of his bottles were 5 figures. He dug in the northest in the late 60's thru the 70's.

 

[myersdiggers1998]

The dump down the road has the biggest coll. I've seen ,besides my coll.[8D]

 

[dmagave]

i saw a dairy bottle collection on the net. i can't recall if it was 20 or 30 thousand bottles!got milk?