Shards and Snippets

It has been a long, cold winter.  My apologies if the stock of three times a week material is getting a bit thin.  Better and warmer times ahead.

A few random things sitting on my office shelves.  First an easy one.

This popped up in my back yard when I was doing some gardening.  It is a circa 1895 patent medicine bottle.  Our house is a decade or so newer, so somebody was tossing trash into a then empty lot.  Or perhaps surreptitiously nipping high alcohol content "medicine".  This is from a fancy bottle that held "Warner's Safe Cure".  There are a lot of variants but this is the commonest one:

It actually had a very fancy looking safe embossed in the glass.  This was both a pun that emphasized the benign nature of the medicine, and a bit of homage.  Hulbert Harrington Warner of Rochester N.Y. made a pile of money selling safes before he got into the patent medicine game.

Here's another enigmatic shard, it came up during construction just down the hill.  Much older, probably 1860's.

If you guessed St. Louis, very well, you are quite smart indeed.

This one is actually a lot harder.  It was a square, amber bottle that held about a quart. It was a type used for both for whiskey and for patent medicines, specifically of a type called bitters.  In fact bitters was pretty much just hootch with herbs in it.  More socially acceptable and heck, it probably did make you feel a bit better.

I have a number of source books on this sort of thing but have so far been unable to document what I assume to be a W.B. or W.E. Lawrence with an embossed medicine - or liquor - bottle out of St. Louis.

And on the matter of bitters bottles, lets get really obscure with this artifact.  It is a bit of advertising that has been cut out, presumably for a child's scrap book.  

Here's the flip side.  This was an advertising card.  They were usually about 3 inches by 2 and were very common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They were free, and often issued in sets that people collected.

It has the usual testimonials, which I've always assumed were made up, and also has a faint stamp from Farr Brothers Druggists Eau Claire Wisconsin.

Very little is known about Cobban or his concoctions. He seems to have been a small time manufacturer. This trade card is the only artifact relating to him that I've seen.  From the newspaper ad below (1886) we can place the approximate date.  An earlier but less legible ad I've seen is from three years earlier.

I included just a bit more of this newspaper that necessary.  The little notice below regards the domestic travails of Henry Gross was just too good a snippet of history to not preserve.  I hope things worked out.