Fall Finds #2 2022

Sometimes I ask myself why I keep going to well hunted antique shops where I find very few bottles. Well, because every now and then something great shows up! I nearly danced out of the store after I spotted an A. Zurlinden White Cross Pharmacy Manville, RI pharmacy bottle. I have a damaged example of the only known bottle from Zurlinden and this example is completely different! Manville bottles are rare, and this is the second known Manville pharmacy bottle ever!

A friend recently picked up a collection of bottles dug at a Providence construction site in the 1980s. I was quite excited, and a few neat pieces were purchased! First was a C.E. Nichols Standard Extracts Providence, RI. Normally a very common bottle, this example with a disc neck is a new variant!

A J.J. Maguire Dyer St. Providence, RI etched blob also caught my attention. What was most amusing is that the back was embossed from another company! No shame in stealing someone else's bottle there lol.

Another odd find was a Jacob Wirth & Co. Prov. RI with a BIMAL (applied) crown top. This is unheard of in New England, and certainly a very strange piece!

A digger from Attleboro had a bunch of RI sodas to sell including a Standard Bottling Co. Pawtucket, RI variant. The top features a Baltimore loop seal closure, which I have to say was unexpected! My other examples just have a plain blob top.

 

Fall Finds #1 2022

 

I walked into a coin shop I haven't been in for years and behold! There were two small shelves of bottles. Most of them were common machine made junk, but a Wm. H. Hinds Providence, RI pharmacy definitely stood out!

I met an old time local digger who was parting with some of his collection. I was disappointed in the lack of locals but an amber Providence Bottling Co. John E. Good Providence, RI made the trip worthwhile! If an amber beer from RI isn't a McManus & Meade, then it's a good one! This was the first amber example from this company.

Going through my tailgate collection purchase I picked out two more new variants. One was a McKenna & Conaty Providence, RI crown top. Normally these are blobs!

Another surprise was a Jacob Wirth & Co. Prov. RI aqua blob. The aqua ones are definitely harder to come by than the clear ones, which are so common I nicknamed them Jacob Wirthless.

The local digger also had a nice F.C. Cundall & Co. East Greenwich, RI pharmacy! At 4-1/4” it was an unlisted size.

 

Summer Finds #4 2022

At the Keene bottle show a real show stopper turned up! A J. Harvey & Co. Providence, RI in amber! This bottle is one of the most common colored RI squats in green, but any other color is extremely rare. I wasn't planning to spend a ton of money, but had to make an exception on an unlisted color!

A friend picked up an unlisted H.P. Falcon PhG Providence, RI pharmacy at an auction. I'm used to finding variants of known meds but whenever a completely new one shows up the exciting feeling of discovery never gets old!

You can't be a RI digger and not find a Warwick Club soda bottle! I picked up this plain looking Warwick Club Ginger Ale Co. green quart and sure enough, I only had it in clear. A couple bucks well spent!

I noticed a Rosseau & Brown Woonsocket, RI pharmacy in a box lot of bottles at an antique shop. I decided to try my luck and to my surprise the shop owner agreed to sell it to me separately! As a bonus it turned out to be a new variant.

I purchased a diggers small collection at one of out tailgate shows last spring. Among the boxes was a T.E. Hickey & Co. Providence, RI split size blob. A “split” is a soda that is in between a normal 12oz blob and a squat soda. Popular in the 1870s-80s, they are scarce to come by in RI and one of my favorite sizes!