Miniature Advertising Whiskey Jugs: Calling Card from America’s Past
If you’re a serious antique collector, you go to flea markets and yard sales, in addition to antique shows and auctions. When you’re seriously hardcore, you’ll even go to the classic “church fair,” especially if you’re desperate.
Church fairs here in New England are certainly well intentioned and for a good cause, so when I go in I always find something to buy, even if it’s a baked cupcake or a whoopie pie, just to show my heart’s in the right place.
Honestly speaking, church fairs can be rough for collectors. There are usually sweet little old ladies, who have carefully set out a bunch of 25-cent items on their tables. Coffee mugs galore, clear unmatched drinking glasses, folded towels and tablecloths, and shoes that were fashionable back when Buzz Aldren was walking on the moon.
One item that may show up at a church fair, if you’re lucky, is a miniature whiskey jug with advertising. The jugs that are sought after were made in America from about 1900 to about 1940 or so. They were made normally as advertising sample pieces for distilleries, but also for local saloons. They are generally about 2 ½ to 3 ½ inches tall, hand-thrown pottery, usually with a black or blue lettering transfer on the front. Occasionally, the advertising will be debossed (indented letters) with cobalt blue filled in, or even hand-scratched lettering thus labeling the item a “scratch jug.”
Now, at a church fair, you may see five or ten mini jugs, but chances are those are newer, possibly ceramic—rather than clay—and may be a modern souvenir piece from a tourist attraction somewhere. They also may be imported from Great Britain, and could have been used more typically for scotch. Any of these types I’ve listed here are generally not very desirable, and have a very low value.
But an early American, small-town distillery mini jug—which contained whiskey, bourbon or rye—is very collectable and occasionally, very valuable!
Years ago, I found a mini jug at a church bazaar in Somersworth, N.H. It was an old one, and it was marked–if I can remember right–“Compliments of Chas. Owen, Parsons Penn.” I may have the proprietor name wrong, but I know it was Parsons, Penn. It was priced at a quarter, and I sold it the next week on eBay for $150! Evidently, Parsons was a small mining town, and it was a rare jug.
Rarity is really the only thing that can drive up mini jug’s values. It can be a beautiful, mint little jug, but if it is common, it will only have a value in the $20 to $50 range. If it is from a small town, particularly West of the Mississippi, and below the Mason Dixon, you may have a good one, valued in the hundreds.
The very best American mini jugs, or at least the rarest and most sought after, seem to be mini jugs from ghost towns out west. If you come across a mini jug that was a sample jug from a small distillery, or a small saloon in some town in Nevada or Northern California, and the town is no longer listed as a “town” on any modern map, then you’ve got a real jewel!
I was scuba diving in a river in Maine a couple of months ago, and was just sliming my way up on to the muddy river bank, when I managed to pull a mini jug out of the mud. It had a slightly damaged handle, and I noticed that the handle had steel wire inside the clay on the handle, like they used it as a frame/ support for the handle. I don’t honestly know if that was common practice. I know I’ve seen it on stoneware handles a couple of times before, but it isn’t the normal way it’s done.
Look at the price this little scratch jug brought! It has the vendor’s actual name! And, it’s from a little long lost mining town in Colorado. When this moonshiner scratched his name into this little jug, he never would have guessed how much value and interest he had added to it. If you find one like this for a quarter at your next church bazaar, you can thank me for this article (by sending me a cut of what you sell the jug for)!
Bram Hepburn collects 19th-century New England bottles and glass, having spent the last 30 years digging and diving for bottles in New England and upstate New York. He has just founded an estate liquidation company and auction house, Hepburn and Co. Antiques in Eliot, Maine.
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