There were no more than eight of the moss-green colored glass bottles, which stand just a tad over nine inches high and are valued as high as $10,000, known to exist when a business dealing with a New Englander on another bottle led to the rare tonic bottle emerging from an attic.

Sachems Bottle

“That’s the thing about the bottle market, there are still new discoveries and surprises,” Lindsey said. “Not quite as many as there used to be, but just enough to keep things interesting.”

The tradition of bottle collecting started out West, digging at old mining and logging camps, ghost town and whistle stops. That’s how Lindsey, who lives in Klamath Falls, Ore., started digging for bottles at Pacific Northwest mining and logging sites as a boy. “These were family outings,” Lindsey said.

Starting in the 1950s, the growing popularity of bottle collecting was driven by such “diggers,” and while digging started in the mining camps out west, it soon spread east. “Urban renewal opened a lot of land in big cities like New York and Philadelphia, and people started to hunt,” Lindsey said. “Wherever people lived, you find bottles, and for a long time, bottles were valuable, they were reused, so recycling goes back a long way. It was only after the Civil War that bottles became a common throwaway item.”

The collectible bottle market has focused on the period of blown-glass bottles—stretching in the U.S. from the late 1700s to the early 20th century, Lindsey said. In the 1920s, machine-produced glass containers supplanted hand-blown glass. Although now even some machine-made items like vintage milk and applied color label (aka ACL) soda bottles are seeing a market, Lindsey said.

And what makes a bottle a valuable collectible?

First, it generally can’t be machine made. It has to be hand-blown glass. “If one compares similar bottles made by both methods, one will easily be able to see the difference—the hand-blown example will have more ‘character’ to the glass,” Lindsey advised.

Cottle Bottle

Second, the brighter or odder the color, the greater the chances it is more valuable. “Color is king,” Lindsey said. There are, for instance, the soda bottles of Cottle, Post & Co., a Portland, Ore., beverage maker during the late 1870s. Most of the Cottle soda bottles were made in a blue-green glass that now fetches around $350 a bottle. There were, however, a few bottles blown in amber glass, and those go for about $2,000, Lindsey said.

Third, the odder the shape, the more valuable the bottle will be, both for its oddity and the fact that fewer of these will manage to survive making them rarer. Consider the elegant cathedral or “Gothic” pickle bottles of the mid-19th century. These long and graceful bottles broke easily, and so they are rare and can fetch upward of $40,000 for the extremely rare, deep amber glass examples produced in New England.

Pickle Bottle

Fourth, the bottle’s embossing can add to its value. Embossing took the place of labels early on, Lindsey explained. While many of the bottles sported just the name of the product and the manufacturer, others have embossing and motifs that were artistic, historical or commercial. There are, for example, the “Corn for the World” flasks with a large, heavily embossed ear of corn and the motto “Corn for the World.” These flasks run a few hundred dollars in aqua color, with the much rarer and aesthetic shades of deep green, various blues and blue-greens, and amber examples (someone once said, “Color is king”) being worth up to $4,000 or more.

Corn Front Bottle

A lot of historical details and information can be found on Lindsey’s website and at the Historic Glass and Bottle Identification & Information website, sponsored by the Society for Historic Archaeology and the federal Bureau of Land Management of which Lindsey is creator and author.

Bottle collecting got a big boost in the 1980s when several big auction houses held regular auctions featuring bottles, Lindsey said, and then got another market jolt with the advent of the Internet.

“Everything started to escalate, and in that flush of excitement, everything went,” Lindsey said. The glass bubble has, however, burst, and a little wiser and savvier approach is called for. “Most of the good stuff has been found,” Lindsey said, and then added, “But you know out in Virginia City, Nev., which has been the mecca for Western bottle diggers since the 1950s, they still turn up a good piece now and then.”

WorthPoint—Get the Most from Your Antiques & Collectibles

Indeed! In this year’s hoopla is the story of 23-year old Danica Patrick, the fourth woman to qualify for the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing”, and unlike her predecessors, those in the know agree that she has a real shot at winning.

“This is a terrific opportunity for memorabilia collectors”, says Bob Swanson, Executive Director of the San Diego Automotive Museum. “Any trip to the Indianapolis 500 is likely to offer a collector many opportunities to acquire all sorts of items to add to your personal collection or offer to other collectors. This weekend’s race has the potential of making sports history. Should that scenario of a Danica Patrick win come to pass, there’s additional value to all the items you bring home”.

Having had the good fortune to attend the annual race, Bob took advantage of bringing home every program, yearbook, local newspaper, event parking tickets, special event entry tickets, badges, pins and pit passes he could lay his hands on. Some souvenirs are even autographed by racecar drivers.

Bob attended the race in 2006, the 90th running of the Indianapolis 500. He was thrilled by the excitement in the air as the racecars took to the track, each driver hoping to be drinking milk beside the gleaming Borg-Warner Trophy in Victory Lane. “Celebrate the Spectacle” was the theme that year and there were dozens of special events leading up to the big day.

One of the most prominent pieces of memorabilia in Bob’s collection is the front page of the local newspaper from the 2006 race that was won by only .0635 of a second or one car length. It was the second-closest Indianapolis 500 in race history. Sam Hornish Jr. was the winner that year. And 19-year-old rookie, Marco Andretti, grandson of the renowned racing great, Mario Andretti, couldn’t believe he was passed by Hornish in the last 150 yards.

Bob recounts how passes and badges got you into different levels throughout the stands. With certain placards getting you into the pits prior to the race, even to different areas within the pits. But his prize possession – the much coveted brass pin – was a ticket for a trip to the tower.

For those who attend the big race this year, take Bob’s advise! Bring every souvenir, program, newspaper and collectible item you come across back with you to remember the experience.