Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Which one is it??



My old mentor Blackie Owen used to torment the hell out of me with shards. He told me I wasn't a digger or a whiskey collector unless I could identify broken bottles while doing "field work". I had to pass the whiskey piece test numerous times just to get into his bottle room and peek at the master's collection. This broken one came out of the foothills above Nevada City.


That didn't take too long to get a positive ID. I guess I will have to make it more of a challenge on the next one.

8 comments:

  1. I don't pretend to be an expert on these western whiskey bottles but isn't that the base of a DURHAM WHISKEY E. CHIELOVICH & CO.

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  2. Give the man an A!

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  3. That didn't take you too long Mr. Blake. Is that spelled with a "POND" or a "MORE"? The Durham shards are very striking yellow in color. Without foot.

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  4. What a great bottle, to bad it was busted, your on the right trail. Back in the early 1970s thre were three of these all with the foot dug from a single privy in Northern California.

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  5. Speaking of ole Blackie, let's give him his due props for all the trade mark drawings and patent registrations that we are using in the blog. LETS RAISE OUR GLASSES TOGETHER AND POUND DOWN FOUR SHOTS FOR BLACKIE, 1 FOR EACH OF S.T. SUITS BOURBONS HE DUG !! Blackie spent countless hrs writing to the bureaucrats in D.C at the Patent office requesting them to look up and copy the info they had on Names/Brands he had seen on his early whiskey bottles and pcs. And yes, he was right, if you don't collect pieces too, you aren't a digger ! There is actually more to be learned from pcs than the whole bottles, since there is more availability and variety existing of molds and colors.
    He treasured these papers with his life and only shared them with a select few collectors for fear of not getting the proper credit. One of his good friends in Utah was kind enough to pass these papers onto myself and our blog originator, SoleAgent, so now we will be sharing them and incorporating them into the research and conjecture presented in this blog.
    APHOTALING

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  6. Looking at the red dirt on that pc, you must have been in E. Chielovich country in the foothills, especially around Allegheny and Nevada City !! I havent seen any non-foots yet in darker colors.......
    For just a second, I thought it might be an Old Signet, but then I remembered that Sasquatch would never show his face in public... haha !!
    APHOTALING

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  7. Hey AP;
    Alleghany Sierra County California -
    First called Jericho and Alleghenytown
    The first miners to settle at the location of the town were from the Allegheny region of Pennsylvania. In the spring of 1853 several of these miners began running a drift tunnel which they named "The Alleghany Tunnel", spelling the name with an "A" instead of an "E" to distinguish it from the region in Pennsylvania. This being one of the first and most important tunnel workings the town dropped its earlier names and adopted the name Alleghany.
    Several pretty rare bottles have come out of the Alleghany area - John Thomas used to make at least a couple of trips each summer to Alleghany looking for "freshly dug" Western fifths. It wasn't unusual for John to spend the night sleeping in his Volkswagen on the outskirts of town.

    G.O. Blake

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  8. These are some rare 1/5's, and that's no BULL !
    As of today, there are 8 known whole examples with the foot, and 6 without the foot. (For clarity to new collectors, I'm talking about the Western-blown/distributed E. Chielovich bottles only). If you are a digger, the best places to look for these are the Woodland, Ca area, Santa Rosa area, and Alleghany area. Several of these have come out whole in each of these areas.

    AP

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