This week I will continue my documentation of my early
finds, which there are turning out to be quite a few of! Luckily I have a list of them, so I don’t
have to wade through my 3,000 strong catalog of index cards.
Bottles from East Greenwich
are of the scarce nature, but thanks to some luck, I have about half of the
known examples. There are two blob sodas I still lack, the famous O.H.P. Rose
Bitters which I was very lucky to acquire cheaply, and a handful of pharmacy
bottles. One bottle I gleaned from Jan
Boyer’s mega yard sale I mentioned in the last entry was a Cundall, Earnshaw & Co. Pharmacists East Greenwich, RI. The website lists Earnshaw and Cundall bottles
separately, so it is interesting to see they worked together at one point. I was later able to acquire a different size
of this bottle on ebay, and aside from the stately Earnshaw Drug Co. bottle,
it’s my favorite E. Greenwich medicine.
My first rare RI bottle from the Little Rhody Bottle Club
show was a hair bottle. Granted, it had
a hole in it so it was free, it was an unlisted size of Mrs. S.E. Hemingway’s Alopecial for the Hair Providence, RI. Alopecia refers to loss of the hair, so this
was probably advertised as sort of cure for baldness. Like J.M. Curtis’s Cure for Baldness, these
two products sadly did not work, hence their scarcity. I borrowed a picture from Don Fadley's excellent site Hair Raising Stories to do this bottle justice.
Early on in my days as an ebay novice, I would get lucky
sometimes searching for key words, of course I had to be even luckier with my
very stingy bids. One of the bottles I
came across was a Dr. Seth Arnold’s Eye
Water. Dr. Seth Arnold was a very
successful quack medicine peddler from Woonsocket,
and is best known for his Balsam and Cough Killer. While a common preparation, it was not known
that he put out an eye water. I’m
willing to bet there are more unknown Seth Arnold bottles out there…
For those of you who collect RI whiskey bottles, you know
how elusive they can be. When they do
turn up, they are usually one of the common companies like Palmer & Madigan
or something rare enough to put some hurt on your bank account (like the $1,100
Simmons & Spencer Schnapps). One
bottle in my good friend Jan’s collection I had been eying for a while was an American Bottling Corp. New York &
Prov. RI amber cylinder. A shoulder
embossed bottle, it’s not very impressive, but is a rare bottle. After it didn’t sell during one of the club’s
summer shows, he came down from $20 to $10, and I happily took my new acquisition
home. I noticed David Andrews found one
of these before, but his does not have the NY location :-)
One of the most exciting digs I partook in was in the quaint
mill village of Shannock, RI. The town decided to do away with the
crumbling lower dam and restore the river to its former glory. Noting all the 1840-50s houses on the river,
I was over there in a heartbeat. I still
remember stumbling upon a spot of the riverbed the 5-foot drop in the river’s
depth uncovered. It was literally
blanketed with bottles, and I pulled a rare local pharmacy right out of the
sand. Next to it I was fortunate to find
an unlisted whiskey. It was a S.H. Cole Liquor Dealer Pawtucket, RI. It’s nice to find unlisted variants, but this
was a completely new find, and this half pint is now properly listed online.
