Plumbata
Bronze Member
So this past Saturday afternoon, after a rather upsetting issue regarding a batch of ancient Greek coins on eBay that put me in a particularly sour mood just after I woke up, Jenny decided to take me and our freshly-minted baby girl Annelise to the river park here in Laramie in hopes of cheering me up. When we reached the converted wooden railroad bridge, I was explaining that it seemed that almost all of my interests were "acquisitive or extractive in nature" and that I needed to rewire myself to also derive joy from simply experiencing things, instead of also trying to incorporate an asset-building or profit motive into my activities, and whaddya know but at that moment I looked down into the water and spied 2 rocks that had recently become un-silted (I check this area often), and in-between them was a bottle that was obviously not the typical residue of this past summer's drunken aquatic revelries!
I naturally excused myself, went under the bridge and plopped some stepping stones into the water so I could reach and coax the mystery bottle toward me with a respectable beaver-gnawed branch without soiling my singular pair of decent shoes. Holy crap it's a hutch! Woohoo! I greedily rubbed off the slime, and had a moment of despair thinking that it was one of those "rare" unembossed examples, but the bottle-gods smiled and revealed that it was indeed embossed (albeit faintly) and a local Laramie piece to boot! Perhaps they were also telling me to cease the nonsense about re-configuring my interests, haha.
Well my blues were instantly cured and I clambered back onto the bridge to find Jenny, who saw me grinning ear-to-ear holding my prize, and from a good distance asked "Is it a hutch?" (she has learned well
).
It is an applied-lip "N.C. Peterson Laramie Wyo" private mold hutch made by I.G.Co., and based on a cursory search it may have been an earlier variant of his bottles, perhaps from the pre-1890 territorial days! I found a digitized newspaper archive and found references going back to 1883, but then lost interest and decided to search for references to dumps across all the papers of Wyoming and holy moly did I find a trove of information from many different towns and was glued to the archive most of Sunday, I might actually be able to dig goodies like I did in Illinois once again, got high hopes for next year! Guess that acquisitiveness is a bit too hard-wired to be ignored, haha.
Sandblasted and chipped, but man I'm happy to have finally found a genuine Wild West bottle (and to have stumbled upon info worth its weight in gold because of it):
Happy hunting everyone!
I naturally excused myself, went under the bridge and plopped some stepping stones into the water so I could reach and coax the mystery bottle toward me with a respectable beaver-gnawed branch without soiling my singular pair of decent shoes. Holy crap it's a hutch! Woohoo! I greedily rubbed off the slime, and had a moment of despair thinking that it was one of those "rare" unembossed examples, but the bottle-gods smiled and revealed that it was indeed embossed (albeit faintly) and a local Laramie piece to boot! Perhaps they were also telling me to cease the nonsense about re-configuring my interests, haha.
Well my blues were instantly cured and I clambered back onto the bridge to find Jenny, who saw me grinning ear-to-ear holding my prize, and from a good distance asked "Is it a hutch?" (she has learned well
).It is an applied-lip "N.C. Peterson Laramie Wyo" private mold hutch made by I.G.Co., and based on a cursory search it may have been an earlier variant of his bottles, perhaps from the pre-1890 territorial days! I found a digitized newspaper archive and found references going back to 1883, but then lost interest and decided to search for references to dumps across all the papers of Wyoming and holy moly did I find a trove of information from many different towns and was glued to the archive most of Sunday, I might actually be able to dig goodies like I did in Illinois once again, got high hopes for next year! Guess that acquisitiveness is a bit too hard-wired to be ignored, haha.
Sandblasted and chipped, but man I'm happy to have finally found a genuine Wild West bottle (and to have stumbled upon info worth its weight in gold because of it):
Happy hunting everyone!
