Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Western or Eastern Cutter


I picked these pictures off of another blog site and was intrigued by the overall stain on a supposed western manufactured bottle. Seems I remember a lot of the comments on western vs. eastern was the overall majority of folks believed you could tell a western piece of glass by the pristine condition of the glass after being buried for years.


Now I'm not the kind of guy that grabs a tiger by the tail but..... If this bottle is western it sure doesn't look pristine to me!

4 comments:

  1. That Cutter looks like it was in a pure ash pit. I have dug a few super ashy holes and it seems like everything except the blacks come out that way. I also believe that some areas like Arizona have such highly mineralized soil that it melanoma's everything. That is a later Cutter so who knows where it was blown? Dale M.

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  2. Many years ago, we had a permission dig here in town on So. Oregon St. It was on the eastern edge of the Judge Hanna estate. The dig became known, not so fondly, as the "Ash Pit Dig". Hanna, like everyone else here in J'ville, heated their place with wood stoves. The ash, and the garbage, ended up in a long, 4' deep, trench. Everything in the way of glass that came out of that pit was caked with stain and etching. The ash played no favorites whether it was a clear "Iroquois Saloon" seed from S. F., an amber Peruvian Bitters, or a Mason 1858. Color, east coast or west coast glass - it made no difference. Everything was just plain nasty.

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  3. I WOULD SAY THIS IS ALKALI DAMAGED, HERE IN NEVADA AND OVER IN UTAH, MANY
    OF THE BOTTLES FOUND IN THE DESERT STATES SUFFER FROM ALKALI ETCHING.
    DOESNT MATTER MUCH IF ITS A SURFACE FIND OR PRIVY PIT, MANY AREAS HERE
    ARE PRONE TO HAVING THIS VERY SICKNESS. JUST A THOUGHT

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  4. In Portland, dug an outhouse with a giant lime ball in the bottom. We cracked open the lime ball and inside was a fleckenstein and meyer 5th stained much like this cutter 5th. Lime will do the same damage to most any glass.

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