John T. & William H. Daly

John T and William H. Daly, wholesale liquor dealers located in New York City, bottled several types of spirits from the early 1850's and into the 1860's. William Newell and Company, located in San Francisco, were the west coast's sole agents for the Daly brothers products during this period.

William H. Daly bottle

 

There are three variants of the Daly whiskey shaped bottle: the John T. and William H. Daly shoulder embossed, William H. Daly with the John T. slugged out shoulder embossed and the William H. Daly with no slugged out area. The John T. and William H. Daly is, I believe the first and earliest variant as all examples I have examined have a sticky ball pontil on the base.

Shoulder embossing on the Daly's

The William H. with the John T. slugged out appears to be the second variant and the William H. with no slugged out area the third. All three variants of the Daly bottle contained Aromatic Valley Whiskey and were advertised as a "medicinal whiskey"

William H. Daly, listed as sole proprietor in 1859, claimed that "Produced as it is, by a process only known to the manufacturer, and extracted from the choicest grain, which grows nowhere, but in a favored location in the Valley of the Monongahela and contains no deleterious admixture".

Counterfeiting Daly's best selling products, during the gold rush era, seems to have been a problem for Daly, as can be seen by this advertisement from the January 1860 Nevada journal.

CAUTION 

It has come to my knowledge, that parties in San Francisco have resorted to the base artifice of attempting to forage my label, with some slight alterations using the name "Delays" instead of "DALY'S AROMATIC WHISKEY" and also using the name "Cumberland" instead of "MONONGAHELA"

These bogus labels have been put on bottles of entirely different shape from mine, containing the commonest trash and packed in cases intended to imitate and branded similar to the genuine, using the name "Delays" instead of "DALY'S" Dealers in the inferior as well as consumers are cautioned not to be imposed on by this bogus article. Particular attention is called to the shape of the bottle, which is unlike any other, and also th the name "WILLIAM H. DALY, NEW YORK" blown in each bottle.

I have no fears of this or any other spurious article interfering with the sale of my "AROMATIC VALLEY WHISKEY" but I cannot allow such a base fraud to be practiced upon honest merchants and the unsuspecting consumer without noticing it.

 

Wm. H. Daly

Sole Proprietor

New York

 

There it is in a nutshell, one of the reasons that manufacturers, proprietors and sole agents had their names embossed on their bottles and sought out unusual shapes to bottle their products in. This counterfeiting was not unique to the Daly brothers. Udolpho Wolfe's Schnapps, Dr. Rosenbaum's Bitters, A.P. Hotaling,s Cutter brands are a few that immediatly come to mind of the many products that were being fraudulently copied and pawned off to the public as the genuine article. 

 

 

 John T. is slugged out on this example

 

The Daly bottles are usually pretty crude and often filled with hundreds of seed bubbles and swirls in the glass. These bottles are considered common and collecting all three variants of this whiskey is an affordable and very nice addition to a gold rush collection. “Any real gold rush bottle collection has a Daly’s”

 

The Daly’s Aromatic Valley Whiskey was a very popular brand of whiskey in Sierra County during the gold rush era. The majority of early Sierra County merchants purchased bulk whiskey and bottled it on site in any container that was available for sale to patrons. These “bottled on site” whiskeys were often flavored and watered down with whatever was handy at the time. A bottle that had the agents name embossed on the glass and was sealed at the distillery or warehouse where it was bottled guaranteed the buyer “Genuine Goods” that were not tampered with.
 

Examples and shards of this bottle have been found in almost all of the camps, settlements and towns located in the North Yuba, Over North and Alleghany area. Three whole examples were found in Brandy City. The author found a dark green example sticking out of an eroded bank at Excelsior in 1988. A mint example of the William H. with the John T. slugged out was found at the site of the early gold rush settlement of Little Grizzly in 1982. Other camps in which the Daly has been found include: The Sierra Buttes Mine, Independence, Chaparral Hill, Downieville and Morristown. Of all the gold rush camps in Sierra County Monte Cristo, by far, has produced the most examples of the Daly bottle.