C2—Lancaster Fanning, Saturday, July 30,1983 They’re all ‘bottled up’ in dairy’s past BY JOYCE BUPP Staff Correspondent YORK Remember all those aqua-colored canning jars that your grandmother filled each year with goodies for the winter, and lined up on near rows on her basement shelves? Grandma would have laughed at the idea at the time, but today most erf those dusty, homey, memory filled jars are worth at least several dollars each. Some command considerably more. Like the fruit jar that garnered a wealth of attention recently at the Pennsylvania Antique Bottle Collectors’ Association show, at the York Fairgrounds. Fitting it’s status as a real “collectible,” the ordinary shaped, half-gallon fruit canning jar is carefully wrapped and packed in its own cardboard box for protection. The price tag of $4,500 ~ that’s right, $4,500 tells casual visitors to the show that this deep-teal blue-colored jar is not just your ordinary old canning container. “As far as we know, this is the only jar like this,” affirms Tom Careful, there's a $4,500 price tag on that fruit canning jar, explain collectors Tom and Deena Caniff. Variety of unusual milk container collectibles from John Tutton’s display include, from left, a Cornell University bottle, indented creamer bottle and a relatively rare cardboard cone advertising the contents as goat milk. and Deena Caniff, the Ohio owners of the valuable old container. According to fruit jar collector Tom Caniff, the unusual blue color which renders the jar so unique is attributable to unusual impurities and chemical reactions within the glass raw material as the con tainer was processed and aged. It’s a classic case of the rare oddity that inevitably results when vast numbers of any one product are made. Near the top of the jar is a cross design, and embossed on the glass beneath are the words “Mason’s Patent November 30th 1858.” Similar cobalt-colored jars have sold for $5,000, so the price set on Caniff’s prize is not at aD out of line, according to the experts. “I traded a bottle for it,” Caniff hedges when the inevitable subject arises about how he acquired the treasured piece of glass. The Caniff couple’s interest in bottle collecting began when they found a few old aqua-colored “junk jars” in old buildings. Delving into the subject more deeply, they learned that their 1930’s vintage finds were really rather common. But, by then the collector bug Ex-dairyman Ralph OeVillars, of McKean County, advertises his appropriate hobby on his cap. had bitten. While'they dabbled for a bit in the whole range of glass items, from milk bottles to glass insulators, like most serious collectors the Caniff’s settled on one main item, fruit jars, on which to focus their energy. Over 200 bottle collectors set up booths in and around the livestock exhibition arena and surrounding stall areas at the fairgrounds, the 11th consecutive year that York has hosted the show. According to the association’s financial secretary, Linda Warner, the 85 member families, most from the southcentral part of the state, especially enjoy the casual, open air atmosphere of the fairgrounds setting. A well-known show, it drew visitors from 17 states, including some from as far away as California, Florida and New England. While many of the bottle collections have strong roots in rural America, few go as deeply into everyday fanning history as the varied and fascinating assortments of milk bottles. Likely the undisputed “dean” of milk memorabilia attending the show was former New York dairyman, John Tutton. ' Tutton, now managing a beef herd at Front Royal, Va., began collecting milk bottles about the same time he sold out his part ice cream trays are also collected by milk memorablia enthusiasts. Sixteen-year-old Mark Tutton displays Biltmore Ice Cream Tray in mint condition. nership in a registered Ayrshire herd in Chataqua County. Impressed with how his partner had always stored the milk for his own use in glass, Tutton deter mined that he would in some way help preserve the lore of milk in glass by collecting bottles representing the Chataqua County dairies. When the family later moved to Buffalo in 1968, research at local libraries put Tutton on the track of the over-500 dairies that once merchandised milk in Buf falo. Tutton set his goal: to ac cumulate a collection of a bottle from each of the 500 Buffalo milk firms. When the move to Virginia became imminent, Tutton sold the 350 bottles he had amassed toward that goal to another qollector. But milk bottle mania is not to be dismissed lightly. Tutton’s next stop was at the U.S. Patent offices in Washington, D.C., where he began research in earnest on the whole antique milk bottle history. Studies sent him in the direction of the Thatcher Glass firm, founded by Dr. Harry Thatcher, |*jHr *i|t **lll *IE mm> I W * m ,** „ *,. rfT: JWUtt «•*,*■•***. “ ■>• .w «w known today as the “father of the milk bottle.” The Thatcher companys replies further his interest in the history of bottles. End result of several years research, study and a growing collection of bottles and bottle lore is a book that Tutton published in 1980 on milk bottles. Titled UD DER DELIGHT, the paperback publication is chocked full of bottle history and bottle pricing in formation. Like other collectors, Tutton has focused on a particular type of bottle and now collects for himself primarily “hospital” and “university” bottles. Hospital bottles were those marked and used strictly by the institutions of healing. They were not circulated by dairies among their regular customers, since it was believed that diseases could have been spread from the hospital to the general public via the bot ties. ■ , A related collectible is thef "J cardboard cone bottle, also designed, says Tutton, as a disease I I (TurntofageC4) •I
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers