Catch & Release.. with Texas collectibles.

Can you read this history?

Sometimes I’m out in the woods with my camera, looking for that award winning Ansel Adams moment, and in the corner of my eye, I catch the shine of… something, deep in the jungle, reflecting back a ray of the sun, and I know, I have to go investigate. Forget photography, it might be time to go BOTTLE DIGGING!

History is not only where you find it, or where it throws itself in your path, but lurking in the deepest, darkest recesses of the wilderness. Almost every deer hunt I ever went on turned into a rock and relic hunt, because after the sun gets high, and you can actually see inside that dense Texas wilderness, all kinds of artifacts begin to emerge. Old beer cans, Indian arrowheads, sometimes an old farm implement. The animals are no longer stirring… it’s time to go get those shovels in the trunk! Sometimes all you have is a tire tool. No matter.

More often than not, whether we bagged any game, we often came home with a new pile of… some would call it junk. We called ourselves bottle diggers and called our finds pieces of history.

For some an unsightly, rusting trash heap, for me a prick to the senses.

Probably the most common “history” we found was the discarded waste of yesterday’s hunts, going back to the early 1900’s, when hunters left behind all kinds of beer, liquor and soda bottles in creek bed dumps, some of the discards very collectible. We proudly came home with those old brown snuff bottles, Purex bottles, and Coke bottles. Almost any gulch in East Texas will harbor such refuse. We would get so excited, gathering up the old glass as if it were treasure, sure we were about to find a motherlode.

It was something to do.

I began to imagine the stories behind the objects. A forest floor spread of long necked bottles and old Falstaff cone-top cans suddenly conjured up the sound of a midnight poker game, or dominoes slapping on a formica camp table, or the smell of gumbo filling my nostrils, or maybe the taste of hot Pearl beer, foolishly sipped out of tossed tin cans when nobody was looking.

And the grown-ups could get a nap. And today I can look at a bottle and tell you when it was made, what it was for, and how much it is worth… more or less. Not a skill in high demand these days, but one that kept me busy and out of trouble many a summer day. And when I am out photographing, sometimes I forget myself, as I see a twinkle in the brush. Here are some shots I took… in my element, the heart of thicket darkness, my knees pressing age- old broken bits of glass, taking in the history, while out photographing the spring flowers.

Found on top of the ground: An old embossed Texas-town Coca Cola "patent number" bottle, which I left for the raccoons to play with. Even bottle diggers practice "catch and release."

Texas Treasure Hunting!

OK, so it's not gold or diamonds. But antique hunting, (I am not talking about shopping) especially bottle digging and other such endeavors have been some of my most favorite pastimes. The idea that I could acquire something, absolutely free, that some people were actively looking for, and would give me money for it if I found it, was planted in me very young. When we used to go deer hunting in far central Texas, we would hunt for geodes in the afternoons between hunts. We never found a good one, but that was just the start.

When we decided to move to Plantersville, we purchased an old parsonage in the Heights in Houston and were preparing it for relocation when I discovered my first real good find. Underneath the old house somebody, perhaps the parson, had rolled and an old whiskey jug about ten feet from the back door step. As I was loosening the plumbing, something was in my way, a muddy mass of something .. looked like a stoneware or glass jug but it was hard to tell in the dark...

Soon I heard the whoops of my father and brother as they reported that I had slung them a one gallon Henke & Pillot jug, in excellent condition. Henke and Pillot later became Henke & Kroger... Of course we argued about who found it... I had just found a lump of mud. My brother washed it and found the old whiskey/wine jug within. Needless to say, I have the jug today. Texas advertising jugs are a very big deal. For the record I have sold some just like it for $250-$300 wholesale and I know they have sold for much more.

We soon learned to examine grown-over dumpgrounds, old wells and cisterns, outhouse holes (if they were old enough) and rotted, abandoned out-buildings. Attics often produce cool things, if the heat hasn't destroyed them. Often, the nearest depression in the ground near an old homestead is a dump, where old bottles and metals survived.

Brad Seigler has sent me this photo of a very early Texas pitcher he dug up in an old dump near Rusk, Texas. He collects old medicine bottles. Thank goodness he did not just chunk the old clunky clay vessel, as it may be one of the earliest I have ever seen. My guess it is an early Leopard or Cogburn, but it could be an experiment... and not even a potter we know about. He has been offered quite a bit for it, probably because it was dug up, and very near a known early pottery producing area.

When we moved to Grimes County, it was not long until I knew where the good digs were... or had been. Great finds had been found behind downtown Navasota, where the old Cedar Creek had been filled in during the Depression era. There had been a fantastic deposit in a lot adjacent to the old Horlock Bottling Works. Hundreds of collectible bottles had been found there during City construction projects, as the City owned that lot and used it for various water treatment processes. They were always digging up another stash of old bottles. And it seemed everybody used to be a bottle collector. Many of the old guys in Navasota had great collections, and would show them off from time to time. Still, there are many bottles we know existed that we have no complete specimans of.

Some of my buddies used to walk the creeks looking for old dumps. And sometimes we would actually just wade in the creek and sometimes kick up an old bottle that had worked free from some ancient dump along some old backwater. Just the other day, one of my bottle digging buds found a Horlock "slug" bottle, Coca Cola logo in script embossed on the back side, in great condition. They used to bring around $100.00. The guy with him had just said he was looking for one... and what he supposed they were worth. Then my friend pulled it out of the creek. "How much do you want for it?" The guy asked.

Having just established a price, you can imagine what my bottle-noodling buddy said!

Hard lessons in antiquing… The 7up List

Every kid once pretended he was a pirate. Pirates were the traffickers of buried treasure, and that was an exotic and sensational prize. When I first started collecting, it had that mystique about it; Searching all over, learning to read clues, absorbed in the hunt, you were focused, and determined. The prize was out there. You had to find it. And the fun part about the search was that not everybody was aware of the value of your prize. They might be using it for a door stop, or a dog bowl. It might have been thrown away in some dry gulch, waiting for someone to retrieve it. It might be put up for sale in a garage sale by uninformed and thus unworthy owners. Better yet, it might be on a shelf of a country junk shop, dusty and neglected and begging for recognition. Often covered under a bunch of worthless rubble, it often felt like a treasure hunt when you dug around some old and time-forgotten place.

And there were so many different kinds of treasure. There was the obvious gold and silver coins, and old money, and things made of precious metals; watches, jewelry, serving sets. But more exciting to me were things that told stories. Old guns and tools, and arrowheads. We bought metal detectors and spent countless hours methodically searching likely areas for buried artifacts. But that was often hard work, requiring some hefty digging to recover an … old rusty bath tub leg or a bent horseshoe. Soon we learned more profitable ventures, like rifling through old dumps. Every settlement, large or small had a dumping ground, where people disposed of their unwanted glass and crockery for perhaps fifty or a hundred years. We found promising places very near our home in Satsuma, and kept an eye open for promising looking gulches.

Once we found a great little dump on Malcomson Road, south of Tomball, where we found one of the all time great stashes. My brother and I had already gone over the spot, dug here and there, and were convinced there was nothing of value. When our dad heard we had given up, he became disgusted and made us go back. He guaranteed we would find something. He was like that. So we went back and looked again. Still, we dug around in a spot we thought the loot might be, with no luck. Then our dad got out of the car and began to kick around on the very top of a sea of rusty cans. We had gone too deep, to the layer that might cough up pre-turn of the Century bottles. The cans were almost fifty years old, and never disturbed again since they had been dumped, and now soft and fragile, they disintegrated in our hands as we dug. Suddenly old brown, squatty 7-up bottles began to show up. Some were like new and were from the 1930’s. We had a field day, thrashing through the old rotted cans like bulldozers, and ultimately found a whole case of the bottles. Some of them still had all the paint, and were worth fifty bucks apiece, even then.

That was our first lesson in this collecting adventure. Never make assumptions, never quit looking, never leave a stone unturned. When you enter a building, look down, look up, look underneath things, up in closet, in the attic… You never know.

My brother Reynolds and I went to Canton's First Monday Trade Days the next month and put out the bottles on the table. Suddenly we were big shots. I must have been sixteen and he was thirteen. The sharks swooped in and out- foxed us pretty quickly. They begged and begged to trade with us, perhaps we would like some nice colorful medicines or bitters bottles... The collectors at Canton Trade Days were the worst about squirming and begging, almost like you owed them to let them beat you in an unfair trade. They kept offering junk we did not want. We just wanted the money. But we did not find many collectors there that used money unless you put a gun their head. I saw what was coming, so I divided up the bottles, telling Reynolds to do what he wanted with his half. Soon many were gone and he was looking blankly at some old “stomachic bitters” bottle, and other unimpressive glass medicine bottles. After they got all of his, they swooped on me like a vengeance. By now the word was out. The booth became Custer’s last stand, as we grew tired of the eager interest in our old 7-up bottles. They relentlessly hounded us until we coughed them up, for less than wholesale prices. That was a hard lesson, and it was not easy to say NO to grown-ups, who keep pressuring you. But it sure was fun being a big shot for a few hours.

Easy come, easy go.

That brought up the second big lesson; Time is your friend. If you keep it, it will only be worth more. Use time to your advantage. Antiques are not fruit or vegetables, they will not rot or go bad. Make the collector sweat. After all, his whole existence depends on getting your stuff. The show might end and he has not gotten what he wanted. Make him be the one who breaks down.

But I had not learned my lesson very well. While in college I ran upon a trunk load of old antique Texas license plates. 1938-1955. Mint, never issued, still had the paper between the plates. I swaggered out to Canton like I was a big shot, unloaded my boxes of treasures, and had them strewn across the grass like a real operator. Suddenly they converged on me. Will you take a check? Can you break a hundred? What will you take for them all? I ran to get some change, and while I was gone, somebody lifted all the 1944 War tags. That was worth around five bills. Disgusted, I sold off the remainder and only brought home some damaged ones. I made around four hundred dollars, but I lost more than I made.

Lesson number three, four and five: Never underestimate your success. Treat it like a business. BE PREPARED. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Don’t squander your great treasure finds. Watch your stuff like a hawk, the first thing that will happen is somebody will take advantage of you. Do your homework, and know enough about your product to fake it BEFORE you set up.

Years later I had a booth at Canton and I had a really nice pair of old Kelly spurs for sale; early Kellys, before they were marked with the famous stamp. All weekend the cowboy collectors came jingling by, looking at my spurs, tight-lipped, grunting to each other, indignant that someone like me had such treasures. I wasn’t even a real cowboy guy. They did not know me. I must be stupid. So they made ridiculous offers, trades and whatever. They questioned the maker. Complained about the mark. If they keep coming back, berating you and your merchandise, that is a good sign! And there was whining and gnashing of teeth. Some guys made several visits to my booth, unable to hide their eager interest. They were trying to use time as their weapon. But I knew, at the very worst, I would go home and hang those great old spurs on my cowboy wall, until I found somebody smart enough to pay me for them.

Good old Walt Rambo, a spur maker and spur expert happened to be showing nearby, so I took them down for his opinion. He did not want to make things any harder for his friends, as the spurs had been a topic for discussion at his both as well. But he told me they were probably good old “honest” (good original condition, not repaired or cleaned) spurs as he liked to call them. That was all I needed to know.

You can never know it all, so always welcome an opinion you trust.

Come about 4:30 that evening, as everybody was starting to pack up, one of my cowboy guys, the biggest whiner of all, came back and made me a fair offer. Time had been my best friend. And when it comes to antiques, it always will be.

That’s the 7up List. Made by learning the hard way. I’ll always keep one of those bottles around to remind me. Antiques often make good object lessons as well!