Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Another Star to Ponder




Here's the N.B. Jacobs hock wine style bottle that John O'Neill mentioned in his comment on the post "The Many Stars of the Pacific Glass Works" by Andrew.




Both Warren Friedrich & aphotaling lean towards this bottle being blown in the east, however the star on this Jacobs bottle sure looks a lot like the star in picture # 5 in Andrew's post.



Warren also mentions that this star is identical to the star on the W.S. Wright soda that is believed to be from the 1863 time period and attributed to the Pacific Glass Works.

So.... Is the Jacobs hock style wine Western or are some of the bottles pictured in Andrew's post eastern?

6 comments:

  1. I really think this is a western bottle blown by the Pacific Glass Works, the star inside the seal is identical to the earliest bases of the whiskeys shown. Also early advertisements for N.B.Jacobs in the Nevada directory also list him as an agent for vineyards in Los Angeles, so it is at least possible that this was a sealed wine bottle, that may have also been utilized for the bitters bottle via labels applied to them. Maybe they ran out of wine and had extra bottles, so decided to utilize them for bitters instead. Just a thought.

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  2. I'm not sure where Rick got the information that the Wright soda bottle has a star design, it does not.

    Jacobs was carrying the line of wines from M. Keller whose vinyard was located in the Aliso district of the Los Angeles area very early on. Actually in an 1860 advertisement, Jacobs alludes to his Rosenbaums Bitters being counterfeited by the Turner Bros' who were marketing a Rosenchefs Bitters, apparently put up in a container externally very similar to Jacobs.

    In Bill Ham's Bitters Book, it is stated that these bottles were found with enough label on them to identify the wording Rosenbaums Bitters.

    I have never seen this bottle in person, but would like to know if it is a seamed two piece mould or a turn mould design. I have advertisements from Pacific Glass Works showing they were making Hock wine bottles before Jacobs went to the square bottle design in 1864 for his bitters product.

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  3. Warren & John,
    I am sure glad somebody was paying attention to this post. Of course the W.S. Wright doesn't have a star on the base. Looks like all the other blogger's were sleeping.
    rs

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  4. This is a wine bottle that is Eastern blown in my opinion and not a bitters as Jacob's dealt extensively in sweet libations of all kinds. The star symbol was commonly used to denote American patriotism both during and after the Civil War and certainly not exclusive to any San Francisco glass house.
    www.oldwestbottles.com

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  5. If this style of bottle that was found in Dayton, NV with the partial Rosenbaums Bitters labels were original to that container, and the bottles were not a two part mould design I suspect that it was probably an eastern manufactured bottle, because the marketing of this bitters began several years prior to PGW's operation.

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  6. Interesting observation John. The bottles displayed in my post are surely western. There are in fact MANY stars on eastern cylinders but they are quite different. Furthermore, many eastern collectors have looked at my photographs and stated that they have never seen a piece of any of those stars anywhere in the ground of the East and Mid-West. That coupled with the prevalence of these stars in western privies is pretty hard evidence !

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