11/26/16 Report - An Excellent Aid For Dating Sites From The Late 19th Century.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Vintage Coca Cola Bottle Found On Recent Walk

One thing I recommend to most treasure hunters is to watch for non-metallic items.  They are often good clues as well as treasures.  Non-metallic items can sometimes be worth just as much as gold or silver.

Coca Cola bottles are common, but some of them can be worth a pretty penny.  Even more common ones can be worth a few dollars.  I sold one that I found for over one hundred dollars.  It was in poor condition.  It had big chips and cracks, but it was rare.  If it was in excellent condition, I could have sold it for about four hundred dollars.

Above is a Coke bottle that I found on a little walk just the other day.  It isn't worth much of anything, but will serve as an example.

I found an excellent 2010 article from the Society for Historical Archaeology entitled The Dating Game: Tracking the Hobble-Skirt Coca-Cola Bottle by Bill Lockhart and Bill Porter.  It is the best article on dating Coke bottles that I have seen.  You can find tons of excellent but less detailed web sites.

Using information from the article such as the table shown immediately below, I was able to date the bottle shown above to 1956.

Two Older Found Fort Pierce Coca Cola Bottles

The bottle on the left is marked PAT'D  NOV 16, 1915.  If you look at the table above you'll see that those bottles date from 1917 - 1930.

The bottle on the right is an older style straight side Coke bottle.  Those two bottles would sell for more than the bottle at the top of this post even though they are not in very good condition.

 The following illustration shows the difference between bottles marked as patented in 1915 and those patented in 1923.  I've found that I can easily sell both of those types of bottles.

The bottle shown at the top of the post is marked STARKE FLA on the bottom.  Some people try to collect bottles from all of the cities that bottled Coke, so if you find a collector that needs that particular city, you might get a couple of dollars for the bottle.

Below is the link to the article that I've been talking about.  It has tons of good information on dating Coke bottles.

https://sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/coca-cola.pdf

The earliest Coca Cola bottles were "Hutch" bottles.  I've shown some of them before.

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Broken Glass and Pottery At The Waters Edge

Junky areas like the one above can be worth looking through.  You can find broken pieces of glass and pottery and other things that will help you date a site.  You can find pottery marks and other marks on broken pieces and occassionally some nice little treasure to keep.  I love looking through junky areas like this for clues.

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The surf will be modest for a few days, increasing a bit next week.  Not much too exciting there.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

10/22/13 Report - Secondary Surface Finds - Coke Bottles

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Four Coca Cola Bottles

I've been showing a lot of high end items from the Sedwick Coins auction and talking about some of the early land sites along the Treasure Coast, but things don't have to be really old or made of precious metals to have some value.  In fact if you browse through the items in the  auction catalog, you'll notice that many of the much older coins of antiquity are not as valuable as the shipwreck cobs.  Age isn't everything when it comes to determining value.  Collector interest is a very big factor, and a lot of collectors like things they had during their childhood.  There might be more supply, but there is also a large demand for things like that.

Two very popular collectible themes are Disney and Coca Cola.  There might be some, but right off I can't think of any more popular collector areas than those.

So what does that have to do with detecting?  As I've said before, there are primary targets (the things that you really want to find) and secondary or even tertiary targets.  Those are things that you might find in the process of looking for primary targets, such as treasure coins, but that also have some value.

Today I'm talking about things that are not as old or valuable, but still have some value and should not be passed over too lightly.

Why pass up perfectly good items that have some value just because you were primarily looking for something else?

I've probably sold more Coca Cola bottles than any other type of item.  I'm not interested in selling most of my finds, but of those that I have sold in the past a good number are Coca Cola bottles, simply because I found them especially easy to sell for a decent price.

Those shown above are nothing special.  In fact some are in poor condition and not especially desirable.  They are some that I had handy and served as examples.  

I found one straight side Coca Cola bottle from West Palm beach that even though it was in poor condition was rare and still sold for over a hundred dollars.

All of these bottles that I am showing today were surface finds.  No digging was required.

The straight-side Coca Cola bottles can bring good prices.  And bottle from the sixties, like some of those shown above, can be easily sold for a few dollars.

The one on the right of the photo above is a Coca Cola soda water bottle.  There is another type of Coca Cola soda water bottle with a star embossed on it that typically sells for more.  I found a few of those and sold them.

One thing about the sixties bottles like those shown above is that they have the city of the bottling company embossed on the bottom.  There are 1400 cities that bottled Coca Cola and some people try to collect all the cities.

Bottom of Sixties Coca Cola Bottle.

To the left is an example bottled by the Fort Pierce Bottling Company.

I think one of the other bottles shown in the photo above is from Titusville.


Below is a photo of two new bottles.  They are unusually small.  I forget where they came from right now.

Anyhow, to the left of the photo shown below is a hand blown blob top bottle.  It isn't a Coca Cola bottle, but is hand blown.




When held up you can see nice large bubbles in the glass.

A Couple Old Bottles With a Couple New Bottles.

The bottle on the right is a Hutchinson bottle with a metal stopper intact.

The first Coca Cola bottles were Hutchinson bottles.  This one isn't embossed and is probably not a Coca Cola.

I have found embossed Hutch bottles.

All of those shown today, except for the two new bottles, were surface finds, so keep your eyes open for bottles that might be collectible while you are detecting or beach combing.

Just something a little different today.


We have a new tropical storm, Lorenzo.  Lorenzo is out in the Atlantic and headed the other way.

Nothing much has changed on the Treasure Coast beaches.

The surf is down around one foot.  The surf will be increasing over the next several days but not reaching the earlier predicted 4 - 6 feet.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net