Today’s post was written by Chatter.
Recently, Austin and I had the opportunity to hunt for old bottles and jars on some property in Georgia that his family maintains.
Austin, being familiar with the land, told me they were there and we should take a trip to get them since I enjoy old bottles and jars so much.
After we talked about going I spent the next month daydreaming about what kind of bottles I would find. There were at least two old home places on the land that were known and there was probably more.
The day we went hunting for bottles was beyond hot. Even with the heat inducing sweat I was like a kid in a candy store.
As I was walking around picking up bottles, I kept wondering who lived there and what they were like.
All kinds of questions swirled around in my mind. Like what their house looked like? How long did they live there? How old were they?
While there I discovered a place with canning jars that Austin hadn’t seen before.
Our family loves to hunt for old glass jars and bottles. Whenever we find them it always shocks me to realize everything came in glass back then, no plastic. Even cleaner and medicine came in glass.
At the second location where the jars were, part of the roof of the house is still there. There’s also some other things left behind that looked to be old appliances of some kind.
Although I’ve always helped mom and dad with putting up food, this summer I’ve been getting into canning food myself. As I looked at the jars I wondered how many years worth of food they had held?
I like to think it would make the people who once lived there happy that years later, I found their old items and cherish them. To most, old bottles like that would be trash, but to me they are a portal to another time and place.
Chatter
Oh good, Tipper. I sometimes worry that my comments are too long. You made me feel better. By the way, that photo of you & Matt when y’all were younger was just precious & you were beautiful & Matt was a handsome dude. Y’all sure aged well because you are still a beautiful lady & Matt is still handsome. Chatter & Chitter look just like you. I’m old enough to be y’all’s mother so y’all are still youngsters to me or as my Dad called young folks, little shavers. Someday when Covid is better & I can make my trip to Western North Carolina, I want to bring y’all some of my old bottles. My daughter doesn’t care a thing about then & at my age, I am downsizing & giving things to folks who I know would treasure them. Have you ever heard young folks being called “shavers?” I never did know why they were called Shavers, would you know? Hugs to you & your family.
Cheryl-I’ve never heard of them being called shavers 🙂 Thank you for sharing that!
Chatter, I love old bottles, too. I have snuff glasses from my grandmother, small old milk bottles with one that has the original cardboard type top on it, a cobalt blue Milk of Magnesium bottle, a large blue bottle that says
Franks’s Safe Kidney & Liver Cure since 1892 & has Rochester NY on it, a large milk bottle with a baby head/face, a small clear Sauer’s Extract bottle, a California Fig Syrup bottle, a large blue Ball Mason jar & countless others. I also love anything old! My Mom always said I was born in the wrong era because I have always loved the old ways of living & treasured anything old. I really enjoyed your video on bottle hunting & your post. Chatter, you are such a beautiful sweet soul. I know Austin treasures you. He seems like a fine young man & I know you treasure him as well. Tipper, do you really read all of our LONG winded comments before approving? God bless you & your remarkable family!
Cheryl-I love all the comments folks leave and enjoy reading them! You all make the Blind Pig a better place with each comment you leave 🙂
I just love listening to all the stories and as I am of the same gene pool as you are – my cooking is- in some ways similar. My mom made corn bread but my father was motherless from the age of 5 and his father made Irish soda bread. My mother was American roots that go back to Philadelphia Pennsylvania. My great great grandparents came north for the free land that Canada was giving away. It is all very interesting where the immigrants moved to and how they survived. Just love cooking with you. You are young enough to be my daughter but at times I feel I am back with my mother in her kitchen again. Your chocolate gravy was my mother’s choc sauce. My sister now has the recipe that she always wanted. Mom would just say I just throw it into a pan and make it which did not help my sister. I am going to have to find some dried beans and make soup beans. Thanks glad I found you on YouTube.
Chatter:
Being from Georgia myself, I am so glad you married a good man from Georgia!
One thing you can put in the bottles that won’t do for canning is homemade vinegar (or boughten). I’m making pineapple vinegar right now and looking for old bottle to store it in, so some of “yourn” look perfect.
My husband does excavation and has salvaged many old bottles for us. We both love them. We have several old medicine bottles and “bitters” bottles. We have three mineral water bottles from high Rock Congress Springs near Saratoga. They are fairly valuable but we will keep them as long as we live. Another favorite is a light blue cathedral type that I researched & found was a pepper sauce bottle carried by Civil War Soldiers to improve their horrible tasting food. We have a pint ink bottle that is light brown stoneware of some kind and a smaller one we think might have been used at a desk. They were in perfect condition.
We love every one of our old bottles. I wish I had abetter way to clean them but I guess their age wouldn’t show as much.
Like you, it is fascinating to think of the times gone by and who might have used the bottles.
Also–I forgot–we have a pretty big collection of whiskey jugs, too!!
I love these old jars! They are beautiful and they are history! My grandmothers used these kinds of jars to can in and I use the same jars, actually some of my canning jars are the same ones she used. It’s amazing to think about.
This is history in the picture of the jars sitting on the table!
Thanks for the reminder!
The bottles and jars are true treasures. Very beautiful.
I, too, am always after old bottles.
They line every windowsill in my house. I always think about those that owned them once. I love the amethyst ones and the beautiful see thru Mason jars. The sunlight coming thru them gives me joy every day.
Corrie you and Austin are a treasure to each other! He really understands your love of old bottles and wanted you to see what he had known was on an old place. I have old snuff glasses that I found on our old place and old bricks that came from the fireplace. I cherish them and old canning jars too. God bless you both!!
Thank you Chatter. It is really great to see a young person with such a sense of history, and even better to see anyone actually use and enjoy the relics from the past. My extended family goes back to old family homesteads and with a metal detector they have uncovered really old items made from metal. I always am so interested in the old paths and roads that get us to these old homes.
I have found it better to use the really old canning jars for storage or even water bath instead of pressure canning. Sometimes the old ones crack just from the years of stress that have been placed on them. You can almost bet some green beans have been canned in them at one time, because everybody I knew always planted beans. Enjoy, and I will look forward to your next adventure!
Chatter, you have inherit your mother’s writing talent. I know I watched your video on YouTube as you and Austin looked for bottles, but you wrote this blog so well I could even imagine the old broken down house, which was not in the video. Well done!
What a great adventure and what great finds. My husband and I did that at an old home place in Eastern Kentucky.
Chatter, those treasures were worth the trip to Georgia. Like you, I also wonder about the hands that once held the jars I find.
A plumber was digging out an area to place new lateral lines behind my house and hit a glass graveyard. He told me how folks used to dig a hole on their property to bury household items that wouldn’t burn. I found a beautiful aqua bottle that appeared to hold perfume a long time ago. The narrow ditch was full of broken pottery and a perfect brown jug with no markings. I planned to dig a larger area but never did.
I have a big harvest of old bottles cluttering up my little house. I use the tiny ones for one sprig flower arrangements on my window sills. The old coffee creamers make great vases and sit well on narrow sills. I have a collection of syrup bottles with extremely thick glass and handles but with very small pouring spouts. I have railroad creamers with spout (larger bottomed to keep from tipping over) and flavoring bottles like soda (the tiny ones that contained just flavor) and vanilla and medicine bottles. Vinegar and cider bottles with beautiful engraved pictures of ships, etc. Johnson & Johnson bottles for baby powder and baby oil. Preparation H bottles, Milk of Magnesia, Pepto Bismol, perfume, medicine prep bottles and even round bottom bottles that were used as ballast in the bottom of ships coming from Europe then discarded once arriving in port here. I love the sun coming in the window making rainbows on the floor after passing through the bottles. I love the stories I make up when thinking about them, I love the history and beauty in craftmanship they hold. I even want to know what will happen to them when I’m gone since no one seems to collect them anymore. Keep up your collecting – it is a lost art that will keep you happy, colorful, and loaded with problems when you are old and need to find them a good home. LOL
Enjoyed the post and the pictures! Sounds like a fun trip and bringing back treasure made it even more memorable.
Chatter , you are just like your Mom and I know some other people that like old bottles . That is special that you like to do that !
Chatter, These bottles ARE treasures. I taught history for nearly 30 years and you have a wealth of treasure here! I have a large brown bottle very similar to the largest one you have pictured here. Mine came out of an old doctor’s office where I used to live in the foothills of NC. When I was a kid, I went to that doctor for allergy shots and illnesses. He was in practice in the same building where his father had practiced medicine since the early 1900s and I always found that building fascinating. You entered from a storefront on the main street and walked through what had been a store in the front and as you got near the back, you passed by the medicine storage. I loved to walk in that building, it’s wide plank floors creaked was you walked and it smelled so good. He dispensed his own medicine in small envelopes with the directions handwritten on them. He was absolutely the best doc I’ve ever had in my life. He could give a shot you didn’t even feel and made house calls when needed. Anyway, when he moved to a more modern building, he gave my family a few of the old medicine bottles. I’m looking at mine right now. It sits beside an old milk bottle in my living room. I value you those things and their history. I am so glad you do, too. I think it would be so exciting to go on a trip like you and Austin and find such beautiful treasures. Thank you so much for sharing your journey and finds with us! Your friend in SC
I think I saw a half gallon brown Clorox jug. And I think the dark blue one is a Phillip’s Milk of Magnesia bottle. I seem to recall they have a scale on one of the shoulders to measure doses. I have no idea why I think I remember that. Never took it myself nor recall anyone else I knew who did.
Good thing you are finding and saving these. If around where roots can get to them the roots will break them. And here is an odd thing about glass jars and bottles in the woods. If they are holding some water and the sunlight gets just right they have been known to start fires by acting as a magnifying glass. In rough carpentry a bottle filled to leave only a small air bubble can be used as a level.
Country folks were recyclers long before it became cool. Glad you are keeping up the tradition. Hope you two find some worth thousands.
Corie, you are a treasure yourself! I love how history is important to you. It’s not just the dates and events that are important to you – it’s the people who lived and breathed during those events and times of long ago. I am like you – it’s the thoughts people had, their daily routines, the conversations with their friends and loved ones, what they liked or didn’t like – those are the things from history I can sit for hours wondering about while I hold one of their belongings. It never ceases to amaze me that people in generations past were not any different than we are today. For some reason we think they just went through the motions of life without real emotions. But they honestly were just like us. I love all the glass objects you have discovered! I think details in items were so much prettier years ago, even company marks/stamps were more unique from company to company than today. I know that with each glass jar you found, you were as excited as if you discovered a piece of gold!!! Thank you for sharing another day of fun in your life with us!
Donna. : )
Chatter, you remind me of myself. I love old stuff – bottles, buttons, arrowheads, books, material, etc. etc.
Chatter…do you leave them in the condition you found them or do you clean them up? They are beautiful and it is awesome that ‘that man of yours’ went with your and showed you where they might be. He seems to be a man after your own heart. Keep looking and you will have a collection to enjoy and perhaps pass them on to your children. What memories and what keepsakes…God Bless you two as you travel along in life.
Glenda-a little bit of both 🙂
What a find! And you tell the story beautifully!
Richard
Chatter, I really enjoyed your post and got to wondering about those people on that land myself! The rarest bottles are seamless. The browns, blues, purples, greens, etc are quite valuable depending on factory glass seams etc. I see you have an old “milk” colored jar that looks to have contained ladies facial cream or a lotion/ potion of some type. It looks like a good one and if lids are on- well well!I actually found an apothecary jar this weekend that said it was a KILL JAR from early 1900s or late 1800s. What in the world? Finally a pharmacy that reveals truth… lol Happy Hunting young lady!!!! BTW congrats on being a newlywed. I wish and pray happiness for you. A modern gal who cooks, cleans and cans is a rare bird and worth her weight in gold!!!!
I think you found a jar used by insect collectors. The jars were used as a way to kill specimens so as not to damage them, especially delicate parts like antenna and wings. The field kit of collectors would include the kill jar.
At one time making natural history collections of all kinds was very common.
You gave me one of the jars from your hunt. It’s a lovely old jar that may have had ketchup in it, we were not sure about that, just our best guess. It’s so sweet that you gave me one. It’s amazing to realize that it’s not that many years ago everything came in glass container….there was no plastic. Now we have a plastic world! I love that you have such respect for this find!
I really enjoyed your bottle hunt video! My sister and I hunted for bottles or any relic we could find on the first property my grandfather owned when he first came to Tennessee. We treasured the few things we found! It was so much fun! I watch bottle hunters/diggers on You Tube sometimes and it’s fun trying to identify the different bottles they find. It’s a “treasure” hunt! You have a great hunting ground in Georgia!
Some of the old bottles and jars are very beautiful. I confess to having a few around myself
Enjoyed watching the video of Chatter and Austin finding all those bottles. They found so many. Like the ones they kept. Got a good laugh when Austin said Narniy’all.☺️
Yea, Chatter, on finding those old bottles, especially the canning ones. You are a woman after your mom’s heart!
We are from Virginia – but have traveled out West some. Going through Colorado we found some old bottles in an old mountain mining area. Always nice to touch a piece of history – we also wondered about the people who had held these glass bottles 100 years ago.