Still Digging into a Lash’s Mystery

AB&GC reader Marc Lutsko writes: I have attached four pictures of a Lash’s Bitters bottle that I dug in the redwoods of the northern California coast in 1974. A friend and I had found a dump below the railroad tracks of a small town where we lived, and had dug several local bottles in the dump, including five Owl Drug Co. poison bottles and some embossed northern California flasks.

At one point I unearthed the corner of what looked like a bitters bottle while at the same time my friend, digging next to me, exposed a top to what looked like a whiskey bottle. Low and behold, we were both digging the same bottle: this Lash’s Bitters bottle. Once we pulled it out of the ground we flipped a coin and I won the toss. Though we noticed some whittle marks in it when we dug it, it wasn’t until it had been cleaned that we saw the very pronounced wave patterns that covered all of the inside of the bottle.

As you can see in the pictures, there are several horizontal lines going up all four sides on the inside of it, where the glass is different thicknesses. It almost looks like a cabin bitters, the patterns are so strong. And unlike whittle marks which occur on the outside of a bottle, from the hot glass hitting the cold mold, these marks are all on the inside.

We were kids then. Now I’ve grown old, and all of this time I managed to hold on to the bottle for nearly fifty years now. So when I saw the article on Lash’s Bitters in the magazine (September and October, 2019), well, I had to send in a picture.

It is an ABM machine-made bottle, probably dating from about the 1915 era, as that is about the date of the BIM owl poison bottles. I haven’t seen another and I wonder if any of the readers have ever seen one like this? There had to be a few of them blown in that batch of glass, but it is the only one that I know of. Thanks for sharing this short story with your readers.