These are some of the best bottles I dug over the years.
Bottle : Stoddard Paneled Medicine, Iron Pontil,
Year dug: 2002
Where dug: Newbury Mass
Type of site: Salt Marsh, very small trash dump
Notes: I dug one of these in the 1990s, in Rochester NH, and when I dug this one I couldn’t believe it. When I found it, I remember turning it over very slowly, to see if this one was embossed, but it wasn’t. Then I just appreciated the fact that it was whole! Stoddard glass cleans up so nice too, without stain. Beautiful whittled amber, applied collar lip, sharp iron pontil base. The reason I was looking for embossing is that it is very similar to a “Dr. Sweet’s Panecea, Exeter NH”. And both of these unembossed ones were dug not too far from Exeter NH, so I’m guessing they may have been labeled Dr.Sweet’s.
I worked hard for this one, in terms of finding the dump. It was near the ocean, at the edge of a salt marsh. I was following a very short, but old , rock wall, and really struggled fighting through a long stretch of very sharp briars. It was muddy, and I wound up crawling on my hands and knees for a pretty long stretch. I came to an open patch by an tree that was older than all the other ones around it. There was a depression in the ground, and I could see a couple of buckets buried in the leaves.
I dug with my potato rake and found a few shards of glass, and then an unembossed aqua med, and a Johnson’s Anodyne Liniment if I remember right. Then, I heard the squeak of glass at the end of my rake and could feel a large bottle with my gloved hand. I figured it was a Fellows Chemist or something, but up popped this beauty. There was literally just some metal pieces, and about 4 or 5 bottles there, like somone had left a small bucket of trash in the woods.
Was a great day in the woods!
The Downeast Digger 