A Small Piece of Atlanta History

Last weekend, I got to be a kid again. I had a shovel and a pale (sort of) and I left the lot Sunday covered head to toe in dirt. The grade school introduction in archeology I received had finally paid off.

Earlier in the week, our neighbor sent me an email to let us know that he found a number of antique bottles in the pit. This came as no surprise as he found the same thing ten years prior during the renovation of his home. On Saturday, Beth and I went over to have a look and sure enough there were bottles and a lot of them. We collected all the loose ones and dug around a little bit grabbing the low hanging fruit. A couple of hours later while Auburn was getting spanked on national television, I realized this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. How often do you get to do your own archeological dig and find bonafide antiques? Late Sunday morning, I purchased a pick axe and small shovel. Four hours later, I had doubled our inventory from Saturday.

So what are these bottles and where did they come from? There are bottles of all types and they appear to be 80 to 100 years old. Most of them were buried about three feet below grade in a layer of bottles and ash. The current theory is that our area was used as a dumping ground for glass. There may have been trash too since there was a significant amount of ash found. The period is unknown, but it would have to be before the late 1920s. That's when the Baltimore Homes Company purchased and developed our lot. I found one bottle of "Warner's Safe Kidney & Liver Cure." Apparently, in 1906 the newly founded FDA requested that Warner's Safe remove the word "cure" and replace it with "remedy" since there was no evidence that it actually cured anything. So I suspect our bottles range from 1900 up to the early 1920s. I found four Coca Cola bottles; three of which preceded the curvy bottle that was later patented in the 1910s. The fourth is one of the original curvy bottles. The bulk of the bottles are apothecary bottles. Some of which have the chemical names on the side of the bottles.

Here's the entire loot:

Below, you can see the layer that I dug out. This where I found most of the bottles and the large ceramic whiskey just you can see above at the top right. That jug took me an hour to dig out without compromising it. I was shocked it was in one piece.

 

Here's an iPhone pic of the whiskey jug excavation:

 

I need help from any Atlanta history buffs out there. I've Googled some of the bottles from companies that were from Atlanta, but I'm not finding very much. So if you have any info on the following companies, please pass it along:

B&B Whiskey
Sharp's Drug Store
I.M. Oppenheim Whiskey