The Sacramento Eagle Revisited

 

Here's a bottle that has always intrigued me. It has been, as long as I can remember, referred to as "The Sacramento Eagle."
 

I think the reason it was dubbed the "Sacramento Eagle" is because a lot of the known examples have been recovered from the Sacramento area. Way to early to have been manufactured in the west it is believed the Eagle dates from around circa 1852. An earlier post on this bottle received the following comment from Matt L. "There has been some discussion on facebook about these recently and quite a few eastern diggers have found them in New York and New Jersey. A good number, (10-20), were privy dug and obviously used. There is some conjecture that it is possible the mold was generic and used by a few bottlers or the bottler who used them in Sacramento either bought some old stock or change the bottle design and then old stock was sold out east or the mold continued to be used."

 

This brings us to some new information discovered by researcher extraordinaire Eric McGuire

 

Rick,

You may want to add this to your post of a couple of years ago regarding the “Sacramento Eagle” soda water bottle. I think we can all agree that this bottle is not specific to California as too many have been found in other parts of the country. Regardless, we also know it was used by one or more soda works, likely in either San Francisco or Sacramento. The attached advertisement from the Daily Alta California January 25, 1853 by J.R. Rollinson & Co., of San Francisco, advertises the sale of 7,344 bottles of “Eagle mineral water bottles”, most likely the bottle in question. I have found no other advertisements to date for this bottle and it may be the only shipment made to the West. That is a good number of bottles and should have kept our unknown soda water dealer in ample stock for a number of years. Even though they have been dug in San Francisco, it does appear that most have been found in Sacramento

The quality of the ad is poor but is all readable.

Eric 

 



image Eric McGuire

Eagle without slug plate

image American Bottle Auctions

 



All of the examples I have encountered  have a graphite pontil and come with either the eagle in a slug plate or, as in the example above, with the embossed eagle without slug plate. Examples recovered from Nevada County California and the Sacramento Valley area have the arrows in the eagles left claw and have been recovered from privy's in 186o's context.

Eagle in slug plate

 

According to the Markota book on western blob top soda's the Sacramento Eagle is believed to be the predecessor to the C&K soda. Personally I have never found any information that can confirm or deny the contention that the eagle has any connection to the C&K soda.

 

 



  Eagle in a beautiful teal blue

 

I have seen the Sacramento Eagle in shades of green and blue both with and without the eagle in a slug plate.

  

The Sacramento Eagle is considered scarce by western collectors and is a nice addition to a collection of early pontiled western distributed soda's

 

Thanks to Eric McGuire for the new information on the Eagle Soda - rs -

 

Better Check Your Bottoms

A while back I wrote a post titled “The Blue Soda Hole”. Basically a couple of hombres and I dug a small gold rush pit late one afternoon and recovered several blue sodas with iron pontil bases. When we finished the pit it was getting dark and I snapped a couple of pictures to possibly use in a post for this blog. When I posted the pictures on the blog I referred to the blue sodas as having “red iron pontils” – That was before I really examined one of the bottles.

After giving one of the Mineral Waters a nice warm bath I noticed that it didn’t have a red iron pontil after all. What it had was red paint over the iron pontil..... Very interesting I thought and left it at that.

A few days, or weeks, or it could have been longer or sooner (I have a time space thing happening as I get older) I mentioned the painted bottom sodas to Warren in a casual conversation. Of course Warren had seen sodas with painted bottoms, and in fact, knew why the bottoms were painted (which didn’t surprise me one little bit).

It seems that while doing research for his Early Glass Works book Warren ran across an ad for Phil Caduc telling the public to take notice that his genuine Napa Soda had the bottoms of the bottles “painted white”. What I thought, Caduc was really saying, was that all those white painted soda bottles belonged to him and he sure as heck wanted them back after you had polished off the contents. And this got me to thinking.......

 

 



.............Oh boy another mystery to try and unravel, might as well add it to the date and time of the western curved “R”, the Fish’s Infallible western or eastern brain twister, the Mlasko T*M western star and Dale’s maybe it just might be possible that the Chalmer’s Catawba Wine Bitters is a 25th anniversary of the discovery of gold in California bottle theory. Wow..... Its no wonder I have this time – space thing happening.

Warren also mentioned that he had seen other bottles with different colors painted on the bottoms and possibly the reason for the different colors were the bottles belonged to different merchants.

 

Image Max Bell

 

Image Rick Simi



 

Image Rick Simi



Sacramento Valley Museum Antique & Bottle Show Williams California

Sign as you enter downtown Williams



Sacramento Valley Museum

Show host Cristy Edwards

Mineral water raffle bottles

Mike Rouse

Randy Taylor

Margie Hansen



Don Grover & Doug Hansen

 

Mike Lake & Chuck Erickson

 

Gary Antone

 

Show floor

 

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Thanks to Arno, Slim, Cristy and the girls for a old fashioned downhome show that we truly enjoyed.

See you next year!  - rs -



Upcoming Bottle Shows

 

First annual Sacramento Valley Museum Bottle Show

 

Hope to see you there for a strong kickoff to a new show - rs