by Holly Horton –
One of the things often uncovered by those who search for historic artifacts in the United States are bottles from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Bottles from before 1800 are less common, because there were fewer of them made and because glass was valuable enough to be melted and reused.
Middlesex County Museum and Historical Society in Saluda has a modest collection of 19th and early 20th bottles that have been found in Middlesex County. Bottles for so-called patent medicines make up most of the collection. Patent medicines were medicines that were sold without prescription; despite the name most did not have patents. The late 19th century was a high point of the trade in Patent medicines; a boom was made possible by a gullible public, the lack of government regulation of manufacturers’ claims (prior to 1906), and the invention of new ways of manufacturing bottles.
