# Beautiful day for digging, not a lot of reward. But nice looking bottles



## Mailman1960 (Jun 27, 2021)

There all slicks ,but different era's. The green one is the one I could use some help with. I live in a area that was active during probation. Would the green bottle been a type used then,any information on other two.


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## hemihampton (Jun 27, 2021)

Mailman1960 said:


> There all slicks ,but different era's. The green one is the one I could use some help with. I live in a area that was active during probation. Would the green bottle been a type used then,any information on other two.




never heard of a area active during probation?


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## Mailman1960 (Jun 27, 2021)

hemihampton said:


> never heard of a area active during probation?


I live in Cook County Illinois, which to this day is still refer to as Crook County. I dig it in a burn dump right across the street from where Al Capone had caves where he would stash liquor. He and without giving away my town that I live in, was known for brothels, had a house in Stickney, pretty much ran Cicero. My uncle had a Tavern Cicero, I could keep going on but it was active during prohibition. I run across a lot of those type of bottles, they all clean up very well it looks they have never had a label on them, which makes sense they wouldn't be able to track where the bottles came from just wondering if it was from that time.


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## nhpharm (Jun 28, 2021)

The aqua bottle is likely a ginger ale bottle from 1915 or so.


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## CanadianBottles (Jun 28, 2021)

The green bottle probably predates Prohibition (at the latest maybe the very start of it) but as NHPharm says it's a soda so unlikely a bootlegger's bottle, although bootleggers could have used whatever they could get their hands on.  Your other two bottles also predate Prohibition, it looks to me like you're digging in an 1890-1920ish section of the dump.  It was very common for liquor bottles to be unembossed in those days, in my experience the _vast_ majority had only paper labels.  Liquor bottles weren't reused like sodas, so no need to worry about keeping track of them.

If you want a genuine rumrunner's bottle, the one type that can be reasonably assumed to be used for bootlegging (if found in the US) are marked 1920s-early 30s whiskeys from Canadian distilleries, which were produced practically for the explicit purpose of being smuggled over the border.  There was nothing illegal about the production aspect of it so no need for the distilleries to keep their identities secret, and they tended to make their bottles lavishly embossed with all sorts of decoration, likely to distinguish themselves against US-made moonshine of dubious quality.


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## Mailman1960 (Jun 28, 2021)

CanadianBottles said:


> The green bottle probably predates Prohibition (at the latest maybe the very start of it) but as NHPharm says it's a soda so unlikely a bootlegger's bottle, although bootleggers could have used whatever they could get their hands on.  Your other two bottles also predate Prohibition, it looks to me like you're digging in an 1890-1920ish section of the dump.  It was very common for liquor bottles to be unembossed in those days, in my experience the _vast_ majority had only paper labels.  Liquor bottles weren't reused like sodas, so no need to worry about keeping track of them.
> 
> If you want a genuine rumrunner's bottle, the one type that can be reasonably assumed to be used for bootlegging (if found in the US) are marked 1920s-early 30s whiskeys from Canadian distilleries, which were produced practically for the explicit purpose of being smuggled over the border.  There was nothing illegal about the production aspect of it so no need for the distilleries to keep their identities secret, and they tended to make their bottles lavishly embossed with all sorts of decoration, likely to distinguish themselves against US-made moonshine of dubious quality.


Thanks for the very good information, I find a lot of pint and half pint slicks to bad there no interest in them.


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## Mailman1960 (Jun 28, 2021)

nhpharm said:


> The aqua bottle is likely a ginger ale bottle from 1915 or so.


To bad no need for them, they clean up like new and clearly made to last a long time.


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