Part 3

The most significant American contribution to the early nineteenth century glass industry was the development in the 1820s of the hand-operated side-lever pressing machine. This device consisted of a single- or multi-piece mold into which the glass was pressed by means of a plunger. Since the plunging process required wide-mouthed molds, pressing was used primarily for glass tableware, although straight-sided jars were also pressed in the later part of the century.

In 1864 William Leighton of J. H. Hobbs, Brockunier, & Co. in West Virginia perfected a formula for an inexpensive soda-based glass that was as crystalline as the heavy lead glass previously used for most American-made clear glass items. This new glass revolutionized the pressed glass tableware industry, and probably was responsible for the flood of clear glass medicinal and household bottles that followed the Civil War. Like earlier clear glass, the improved lime glass was tinted with manganese oxide to remove its natural green coloring. Clear glass items manufactured with manganese tend to turn varying shades of lavender when left exposed to the sun. Manganese was imported from Germany in the nineteenth century to decolor glass and was no longer used after the outbreak of World War I.

In the immediate post-Civil War period, the American glass industry expanded rapidly. Molds were improved and worker and furnace productivity increased to many times their 1800 level. New bottle shapes were introduced, and specialized and embossed bottles proliferated. The manufacture of preserve jars became a major industry, and a special “blow-back” mold, included in John Mason’s 1858 fruit jar patent, was used to form the screw threads for the sealable lids. Standard bottle shapes for different products became common, as did uniformly applied standard lip forms for different purposes. The standard shapes of the bottles from the Middleton Place privy are shown in Figure 16. Turnmolding, a long-known method of removing mold marks by rotating the unfinished bottle in the mold, became a popular way of manufacturing unblemished wine bottles. A popular technique of embossing was plate-molding, an operation in which a personalized name plate could be inserted into a standard mold for inexpensive lettering of even small runs of bottles.

The first mechanized production of bottles in the United States was on a semiautomatic “press-and-blow” machine patented by Philip Argobast in 1881 and used by the Enterprise Glass Co. of Pittsburgh to make Vaseline jars in 1893. Although the molten glass still had to be gathered and dropped into the mold by hand, the Argobast machine could produce completely machine-molded wide-mouth jars by pressing the lip and blowing the body in two separate operations. Semiautomatic production rapidly took over the fruit jar industry, and by the turn of the century most fruit jars were made on semiautomatic machines rather than in the traditional blow-back molds. Narrow-necked bottles, however, could not be manufactured on “press-and-blow” machines because the plunger for the pressing operation could not be withdrawn through a narrow opening. Although a “blow-and-blow” machine for narrow-necked bottles was developed in England in the late 1880s, semiautomatics for small-mouthed ware were apparently not introduced in the U.S. until after the development of the automatic Owens bottle machine in 1903.

The Owens machine, invented by Michael J. Owens of the Toledo Glass Co., was put into production in 1904. It differed from the semiautomatics in that the glass was gathered into the molds by mechanical suction process, thus completely eliminating hand labor. Despite a series of improvements from 1904 to 1911, the Owens machine was slow to gain acceptance, both because of its expense and because of the restrictive licensing policies adopted by the Toledo Glass Co. In 1905 most bottle production other than wide-necked jars was still by hand. Semiautomatics came into increasing use, however, and a number of improvements made them a serious threat to the Owens machine. After about 1914, there was a proliferation of patents for automatic feeding devices that could cheaply convert the more modern semiautomatics into fully automatic machines. Use of feeder-fed semiautomatics, as well as the Owens automatic machines, reduced hand bottle production to 50% of the country’s output by 1917, and to less than 10% by 1925. More efficient feeder machines slowly replaced the Owens-type suction machines and are the type in general use today.

MEDICINE BOTTLES

As glass manufacturing expanded after the Civil War, so did the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmacology became a more exact science than it ever had been, and its practitioners dispensed their compound medicines in glass bottles that for the first time were available in precisely graduated sizes and a variety of shapes often tailored to suit specific products. Early post-war bottles were usually made in the aquamarine of “green” glass that had become traditional for apothecaries’ wares, but use of clear lime glass spread until by the end of the century most pharmacy bottles, like most of those from the Middleton Place privy, were made of clear glass.

One of the first of the new shapes was the “French square,” a tall bottle with beveled corners introduced in the early 1860s (Fig. 17). The French square was followed by more elaborate rectangular, round, and oval shapes, many of them adapted with one or more flat sides to accommodate the paper labels or plate-molded lettering with which pharmacists usually marked their wares. The “Philadelphia oval” shown in Figure 17C, plate-molded with the name of an 1867-1902 Charleston pharmacy, was a favorite shape.

Despite such advances as Louis Pasteur’s bacteriological discoveries, ideas of medical treatment in the nineteenth century remained primitive by modern standards. Without many of the vaccines and antibiotics now available, people dosed themselves with a wide range of substances which most twentieth century invalids would hold in dim regard. For instance, pharmacists distributed morphine in small bottles such as that shown in Figure 17E. Vegetable extracts that would not now be in anybody’s pharmacopoeia were often sold in panel bottles (Fig. 17B).

One of the few restrictions placed on the more dangerous medicaments was packaging. In 1872 the American Medical Association, concerned over accidental poisoning, issued a recommendation that potentially harmful substances be bottled in distinctively colored containers that were also recognizable by touch. One result of this directive was blue quilted poison bottles (Fig. 17D). A specialty of Whitall, Tatum & Co., a major manufacturer of pharmaceutical wares, these bottles were manufactured until about 1920. Other companies continued to produce poison bottles until the 1930s, when it was decided that the bright colors and fanciful shapes were more an attraction than a deterrent to children exploring the medicine cabinet.

A better-known but less savory branch of nineteenth century medicine was the patent medicine industry, which exploded into notoriety with its extravagant use of the new late nineteenth century advertising techniques. While most patent remedies were alcohol- or narcotic-based frauds, the term patent medicine meant simply any medicine sold without a prescription and included a number of legitimate and effective over-the-counter remedies. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and subsequent acts of Congress were intended to control dangerous substances and put an end to spurious advertising claims, and resulted in the alteration or removal from the market of many patent medicines. Others, such as Bromo-Seltzer, survived the legislation and continued to be sold for years.

Most patent medicines were in fact not patented, for that would have meant revealing the formula to competitors and consumers alike. Nevertheless, the nature of many of the more potent over-the-counter remedies was not entirely unknown. Hostetter’s Bitters, for example, was regulated by the South Carolina Dispensary along with whiskey and beer.

Only three patent medicine bottles were recovered from the Middleton Place privy deposit, and all appear to have been rather tame digestive remedies of the sort that might be sold today. The amber bottle on the left (Fig. 18A) contained Maltine, probably a digestive and nutritional supplement rather than a cure. The blue bottle (Fig. 18B), the same shape that was later used for Bromo-Seltzer, probably contained Bromo-Caffeine, an antacid and laxative whose main ingredient was magnesia. Bromo-Caffeine was the principal product of the Keasbey & Mattison Co., which operated in Philadelphia from 1873 to 1882, and in Ambler, Pennsylvania, from 1882 to 1962. The blue-green bottle (Fig. 18E) contained Horsford’s Acid Phosphate of Lime, a phosphate-based preparation sold by the Rumford Chemical Works of Providence, Rhode Island, from 1868 until at least the turn of the century. On later bottles, however, the company name reads from top to bottom rather than from bottom to top.

The predecessor to these sturdy containers was a thin-walled cylindrical bottle used by the apothecaries and pharmacists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Fig. 19). All free-blown or dip-molded, these bottles were used as late as the 1850s, and because of the Civil War, perhaps even later in some parts of the South. The two bottle bases at right are turned up to show the blow-pipe pontil scar made by holding the bottle with a blow-pipe while its neck and lip were formed. The long neck on the right is probably not from a cylindrical bottle but from a globular flask that was used in larger sizes for wine and other beverages, and in smaller sizes for medicines and essences. The style of its collar dates this bottle to after about 1820.

WINE AND SPIRITS BOTTLES

Perhaps the oldest use for glass bottles has been the storage and transport of alcohol. Some of the oldest bottles from the Middleton Place privy are wine and spirits bottles. Bottles made in the same dark green glass as the three pictured below left were used by the earliest colonists for various wines and spirits, and, although the bottle shapes have varied over the centuries, the tradition continues in the green wine bottles of the present day.

With the improvement of glassmaking techniques in the nineteenth century, alcohol bottles became more diverse and specialized. Although a simple cylindrical bottle (Fig. 20B) remained a standard for various types of spirits, flasks, like those later used by the South Carolina Dispensary (Fig. 22B and C), became more and more common for whiskey. Beer bottles developed a distinctive shape (Fig. 21), and different shapes evolved for different types of wines. Figure 20A is a Bordeaux wine bottle, used since the early nineteenth century for the sauternes and clarets of the French Bordeaux district. The amber miniature shown in Figure 20D is a two-ounce sample bottle of the shape normally used for German Rhine wines. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most types of alcohol bottles could be purchased in miniature sizes for use in advertising and promotion.

BEER BOTTLES

The three late nineteenth century bottles shown below represent one of the oldest pastimes in America. Until the late nineteenth century, however, most American beers were locally produced ales, stouts, and porters that were not bottled but sold in kegs to taverns. Modern lager beer was first introduced by German immigrants in the 1840s, but it was not until the 1870s that the expanding railway system, together with the food preservation techniques developed by Louis Pasteur in 1870, made it feasible to brew and bottle lager beer for a nationwide market.

Lager beer was less alcoholic but more effervescent than earlier beers. Increased bottling of lager and carbonated soft drinks spurred the search for new bottle seals capable of withstanding more pressure than the traditional cork, which was subject to leakage and had to be tied down to prevent its popping out altogether. Two of the most successful of the dozens of stoppers patented in the decades following 1870 were Henry Putnam’s levered 1882 Lightning stopper (Fig. 21A), and William Painter’s 1892 crown cap (Fig. 21B), the closure still used on most beer bottles.

With these and other developments, production of bottled “export” lager increased rapidly through the 1880s and 1890s. Keeping pace with the growth of the beer industry, however, was the group that was to prove its undoing: the American temperance movement. The temperance movement became an organized lobbying force with the 1893 founding of the Anti-Saloon League, and thereafter exerted increasing pressure on Congress and the state legislatures. “Dry” agitation in South Carolina led to the implementation from 1893 to 1907 of a statewide dispensary system to control distribution of beer, wine, and spirits; by 1916, South Carolina and 22 other states had prohibited all sale of non-medicinal alcohol. National wartime legislation banned the manufacture of distilled spirits in 1917 and beer and wine in 1918. The Volstead Act of 1919 extended this ban until the eighteenth amendment forbidding the production or sale of any beverage with more than .5% alcohol could take effect in January 1920.

Prohibition completely changed the face of the American brewing industry and almost completely destroyed the tradition of the small local brewer. Many brewers tried to survive by selling soft drinks and “near beer,” a lager with less than .5% alcohol. “Near beer,” however, could not stand up to the competition of home brewers and bootleggers, and most breweries either turned to the manufacture of other products or closed down altogether. Two months after the sale of wine and beer was again permitted in April, 1933, only 31 breweries had reopened. In 1940, seven years after the lifting of all national restrictions on alcohol, beer production finally reached its pre-Prohibition level, but the number of breweries in operation was less than half the number in 1910.

SOUTH CAROLINA DISPENSARY BOTTLES

The South Carolina Dispensary system, in operation from 1893 to 1907, was a nearly unique and completely unsuccessful attempt to control alcohol abuse by placing a state’s entire retail liquor trade into the hands of its government. Touted by its sponsor, Governor “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, as a means of encouraging temperance, guaranteeing purity of product, and returning alcohol revenues to the citizens, the dispensary was born as an eleventh hour compromise between pro- and anti-Prohibition forces in the state legislature. The measure as enacted satisfied neither side, and the dispensary remained a volatile issue in state politics until its repeal 14 years later.

The system functioned by buying up wholesale spirits from local and out-of-state manufacturers, repackaging or relabeling them at a Columbia distribution center, and retailing them to the public through locally operated dispensaries. Beer, which was never bottled by the dispensary, was sold privately under special license, and alcohol of any sort could be brought into the state for individual consumption. In the beginning, all liquors were sold in special dispensary bottles, but by the turn of the century, the dispensary was handling hundreds of products, many of them pre-packaged national brands.

Litigation and often violent public resistance (an 1894 “whiskey rebellion” left three dead) plagued the system in its early years. By 1905 the internal corruption had become so pervasive that a legislative investigating committee recommended closing the system as unmanageable. Despite the now-handsome profit that it was returning to the state treasury, the South Carolina dispensary was abolished by the Carey-Cothran Act of the state legislature in 1907.

South Carolina Dispensary bottles came in three basic shapes: Union flasks, Jo-Jo flasks, and cylindrical bottles and jugs. Bottles made before 1899 were embossed with palmetto trees (Fig. 22A and C), and those made after 1899, when public disapproval forced the removal of the state symbol from liquor bottles, were embossed with an intertwined SCD monogram. Bottles were manufactured for the dispensary by over 20 different glass factories, but after 1902 all but one brief contract went to the Carolina Glass Company of Columbia.

FOOD CONTAINERS

Although olive oil, pickles, and other foods that do not require sterilization have been packed in glass and ceramic containers for centuries, the preserving of hot foods in airtight glass or metal containers is a comparatively recent development. Housewives in the eighteenth century knew how to preserve fruits by boiling them in glass jars that were subsequently corked and sealed with wax, glue, or pitch, but the idea of canning as we know it was popularized by Nicholas Appert, a French confectioner who in 1809 won a prize from Napoleon for his method of keeping food fresh for soldiers in the field. Appert succeeded in preserving over 50 kinds of food, including meats and vegetables, and published an essay detailing his method of boiling food in a wide-mouthed jar and sealing it with a firmly driven cork. The process was quickly copied in England and America, where seafood, fruit, and pickles were first packed for wholesale in New York and Boston about 1820.

A major problem with Appert’s method of preserving in glass was the irregular finish of hand-made bottles, which often prevented the cork stopper from forming an absolutely airtight seal. For commercial packers, an early and lasting solution was the tin-plated canister, patented in England in 1810 and in the United States in 1825. An inexpensive and effective closure for glass containers had to await John Mason’s 1858 patent of the threaded jar seal, which consisted of a molded screw thread that allowed the cap to seal on the shoulder rather than the uneven lip of the jar. Home canners still use a similar screw-top jar today.

Many Americans, both civilian and military, had their first taste of commercially canned foods during the Civil War. Increasing varieties of meats and vegetables were packed in tin cans in the late nineteenth century, but glass bottles remained—and still remain—chiefly the package of condiments, sauces, and other foods that require a reclosable cap.

These limited uses can nonetheless result in a large number of empty containers. Food bottles are usually one of the most numerous items found in a household trash heap. At Middleton Place, only four of a total of seventy-seven bottles were food containers, and all had originally held the preserves, flavorings, and oils that are usually packaged in glass. Figure 23A shows a “One-pound American preserve,” a jar sold at the turn of the century by at least one glass company, and Figure 23B is a typical late nineteenth/early twentieth century olive oil bottle. Figure 24 shows both the excavated example and a 1920 catalogue illustration of a white pressed glass container for Armour’s Beef Extract, a by-product of the packing business produced by Armour & Co. beginning in 1885.

None Genuine without

4 OZ. NET WEIGHT

Armour’s Extract ^of Beef

MANUFACTURED & PACKED BY ARMOUR & CO, Chicago. U.S.A.

BOTTLES MADE AFTER 1900

This final group of bottles and jars have nothing in common except their date. The two clear glass bottles at left are standard desktop ink bottles made after the 1904 introduction of the Owens bottle machine and before screw top inks replaced the corked variety around 1930 (Fig. 25). The conical ink in the center was one of the earliest shapes for desk-top ink bottles, introduced when ink was first bottled in small individual containers in the 1840s. The contents of the ointment jar at right, made after 1916, are unknown. Patent records indicate that the May 15, 1916, date was neither a trademark registration nor a patent issue. It may be a false patent date, put on the bottle to lend the contents an air of legitimacy.

Although other artifacts, such as the Austrian porcelain in Figure 11 and the beef extract jar in Figure 24, may have been manufactured in the twentieth century, these three containers were the only items in the privy pit that were definitely made after Susan Middleton’s 1900 abandonment of the plantation. As such, they were the only evidence archeologists had that these nineteenth century objects were probably deposited in the twentieth century. All three are items likely to have been in use at the time of the Smith family’s 1925 move to Middleton Place, and they were probably discarded at that time.

LAMP GLASS