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My son and I went to the Smithsonian last week, and there was a woman set up at one exhibit who was showing how chocolate was made in the 1800’s in America. She had block of cane sugar, and a couple of other ingredients laid out. But on the wooden cutting board in front of her I was amazed to see actual raw cocoa beans sitting in a flat bowl. The reason I was amazed was because I knew that back home in my basement on my bottles shelf, I had an 1850’s redware dish that I found scuba diving, and laid out in the dish were some very similar looking beans. I had found those beans in an 1850’s bottle on the same dive! The bottle was sealed, and looked like it contained Boston baked beans, but I pried open the cork, and poured the oozy mess out onto a flat board in the sun, and dried them off, and the photo you see there are what was left after it all dried out. I had always wondered what they were, and now I tend to think that they were cocoa beans for making chocolate!

I finally got a good photo of this Dr. Stocker’s Sarsaparilla that I dug out of a Maine Riverbank. I wanted the bottle, and the story of finding it to be in my new book, but I’ve always had trouble photographing clear, embossed bottles. This time though, I took my time, and kept posing the bottle in different spots with different lighting. Finally, on a cloudy, gloomy day, the lighting coming into our living room was just right.

In my new book “A Field Guide to American Trash” there is a large chapter on the different colors of sea glass, and what types of old bottles they came from.  This was a really fun dig!  Came from a salt marsh in Massachusetts, embossed ” Old Dr. Goodhue’s Root and Herb Bitters from Salem Mass. Next to it you can see a broken panel to a Baker’s Orange Grove Bitters.

 

I got this blacking bottle diving the bottom of a river a ways back. It dates back to the 1850’s, with a sharp open pontil. It was full of silty mud, with the cork still jammed in it.  After working out the cork, and draining the silt out, I found that the metal dauber that was used to spread the blacking polish was still in it!

Last week I went hiking in the woods looking for prospective dump sites, and came across a surface dump back in the woods.  There wasn’t a lot of hope for finding anything very old, as the bottles were mostly screw tops, dating to the 1930s.  But, you never know.  After about twenty minutes, out rolls an aqua insulator.  The inside was full of dirt, which I had to pick out with a stick, before I realized what I was had actually dared to hope, which was that it was an early threadless one!  Haven’t dug one in years, really made my day.