Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| 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.
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.
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| Two Older Found Fort Pierce Coca Cola Bottles |
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