Soda Bottle
Friday, May 30, 2008 | (7) Comments
I drove south with a couple of friends to meet the New Mexico Historical Bottle Society on a club dig held at the Black Range Lodge in Kingston, New Mexico.
A recent article in New Mexico Magazine centered around this B&B and it's owners who often hold workshops on straw bale building at the lodge. In the interview, Pete talked about an old hutch soda bottle he had dug nine years ago. This caught the attention of one of our members who contacted him and made arrangements to come down to the lodge to see it. It was an unknown soda for New Mexico.
After their meeting, our friend wrote an article about this new find, hutch sodas are something he knows a lot about, and helped make arrangements for our group to come to Kingston to dig for bottles. The weekend approached, reservations at the lodge were made and we headed south with our tools.
We followed Pete around the property, heard Kingston mining history and enjoyed our surroundings thoroughly. One person decided to dig just outside the lodge near some early excavation for a trampoline, where bottles had been unearthed. I decided to dig behind a stone wall near the same site, which I felt would meet the same bottle layer. Only my site would need to go down 3-4 feet to reach the same ground. The first day I got the hole opened up and found broken necks, bottoms & stoneware, which I put nearby; my spot was under this big tree, nice and cool. The second day I took the hole deeper and found larger pieces of broken glass and a pottery crucible. When I scratched dirt away from a bottle, I saw immediately that it was a soda and had round shoulders, and when I saw that it was embossed, I knew it would be the one we were looking for. It lay under a big brown beer which came out whole.
The soda pictured here is broken, it is missing the big blob top which we later looked for by screening the dirt pile. This bottle says Black Range Soda Co - New Mexico and is the second known of its type. It was quite celebrated and a fine moment to share with friends on the dig.
The other item pictured is one of the crucibles. It is debossed, imprinted with 2 French names. One the maker, the other who it was shipped to. Through some computer searching, I've found out it was a French immigrant who built a business selling supplies to assay offices and miners.
Everything that we found during the dig will go into our museum.
-- Patricia Brown
