Maine’s history bottled up Collector to discuss hobby in Bangor

Sam Fuller Jr. collected bottles in the 1960s and 1970s with his father and brother, but his interest waned amidst other priorities: school, marriage, raising children. But eight years ago, while his son was working on an Eagle Scout project on a local nature trail, Fuller rediscovered his hobby in an old dump pile.

“There were three or four soda bottles on top of that, and I picked those up and it got me thinking about those old days,” Fuller recalled.

Fuller began collecting again, organizing his bottles in a computer database. The method impressed a friend, who suggested he write a book about Maine bottles. Five years and hundreds of research-hours later, “Maine Bottlers and Their Bottles” was complete. He’d expected to detail about 250 independent beverage bottlers in Maine from 1842 to 1980, but had catalogued more than 850, learning plenty of Maine history along the way.

“I’m a history buff because of bottles,” he said. “I wasn’t that much before, but I’ve learned a lot more about the state of Maine.”

Fuller’s home is bursting with bottles; nearly every shelf and windowsill displays them. A back room, packed with medicinal bottles, looks like an overstocked 19th century drugstore. His garage is a bottle warehouse, with hundreds displayed in alphabetical order by town. And he has ancillary pieces, such as wooden bottlers’ crates, bottle caps, marketing signs, bottle openers, and more.

He’s currently writing a book about Maine’s medicinal bottles. Apothecaries and druggists carried such brands as Ko-Kane (it’s what you think) and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, a morphine drink for teething infants (and popular with Civil War soldiers who had become addicted to it in field hospitals). He’s already cataloged 3,500 Mainers who either bottled or sold medicinal products from more than 250 Maine towns and cities.

He’s also working on a book about Maine pontil bottles, which are generally pre-Civil War. Pontils, identified by the cylindrical indentations in their bases where the molten glass was held while being blown, are among the most valuable.

Aspiring collectors also should check the vertical mold lines; generally, the higher they go, the newer the bottle. The invention of the Owens Automatic Bottling Machine in 1903 brought mass production to bottling; with no need to refill bottles, they became more plentiful and less valuable. These bottles feature mold lines up to the top of the bottle’s neck. Lower mold lines indicate older, potentially pricier bottles.

It’s an easy hobby, as old soda bottles usually are inexpensive. But some sellers assume that “old” means “costly,” and put exorbitant price tags on low-value bottles. The key is to learn about your bottles, and as you do, you’ll uncover some fascinating Maine history in the process.

Every bottle has its own story, and Fuller knows his stuff. Point out any bottle in his collection, and he’ll launch into the fascinating tale of its bottler, how common or rare it is, and its value.

Take the “gravitating ball Hutchinson stopper,” a composite rubber ball held in place inside the bottle by carbonation pressure. To drink it, you pushed the ball down, releasing the pressure. This 1880s bottling method ended for obvious sanitary (and flat soda) reasons. And since children often smashed the bottles to get at the “marbles” within, few survived.

“The first one of these I ever saw was on eBay, and the seller said, ‘There’s this ball stuck in the bottle, and I just can’t get that thing out of there,'” Fuller recalled.

But bottle collecting transcends price tags. At one of his presentations, a woman showed Fuller a Nailsea flask. The color-swirled pontil bottle, with an intact paper label, had originally been a wedding present in the 1850s. “And this was still in this lady’s family,” Fuller said. “I said, ‘Hold onto that, because that is so special.'”

A Maine bottle is filled with history, whether it’s a business tale or a family story. Fuller advises people to check their attics, barns, and back yards, because there may be treasures there. “It doesn’t have to be the value of the actual bottle,” he said. “It’s the personal history that goes with it.”

Fuller will appear at 2 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 29, at the Bangor Public Library, to give a public presentation about Bangor’s soda, beer and spring-water bottlers. He encourages people to bring their old bottles to the presentation for identification – and perhaps a history lesson.