Story of an Artifact: "Truman" Whiskey Bottle

President Harry S. Truman. Source.

I hope this to be the first in a sequence of posts concerning the lives of the artifacts found during the excavation at Shabbona Grove. This gorgeous bottle is one of the most enigmatic pieces found during the surface collection, with the face of a spectacled man on the front who the crew originally thought looked like President Harry S. Truman. Above the portrait is a line that states "Federal Law Forbids Sale or Re-Use of this Bottle". This inscription was required by law to be applied to all alcohol bottles following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and was used until the mid-1960s. To the left is an industrial scene on water and to the right is a single colonial-style house. I apologize for the poor lighting in the photographs; clear glass is difficult to work with and I've had no formal instruction in artifact photography.

Left side. Beneath the wheat reads "Harry E." The other side

 has another name, William Wilken.

The bases of bottles often contain vital information about the manufacturer. The maker's mark on this bottle is a W above a T in an inverted triangle.

The aluminum cap, machine-made bottle, and inscription clearly marked the bottle after World War I. But did did the picture really depict President Truman? What did the bottle contain and when was it made? Do we know how it could've gotten into Shabbona Grove? Because the bottle was found on the surface, little can be gained from its provenience and it's relationship to the other artifacts. We would have to rely on the information carried on the artifact itself to figure out its story. 

The first line of evidence to explore was the manufacturer's mark on the bottom of the bottle. As shown above, the manufacturer's mark is a W above a T in an inverted triangle. Historic glass enthusiast David Whitten has published an impressive directory of marks on his webpage (here) that contained this mark! He attributed the mark to the Whitall Tatum Company from New Jersey in the years 1922-1938. Whitten emphasizes the pharmaceutical bottles produced by the company, but this bottle does not share the trademark rectangular shape with front and side panels to display the pharmacy name on (as shown in the examples on Whitten's website here). This information immediately tells us that the man on the front of the bottle is unlikely to be Truman, as he did not gain presidency until 1945. The other numbers on the bottom of the bottle are coded to indicate the form and date that the glass was made, but I couldn't find the manufacturer's information to discover anything more from the mark.

The names on the side of the bottle gave another line of evidence to try and discover what its original contents may be. After googling around the internet, it came to light that many other people had found similar bottles from the Wilken Family Blended Whiskey Company. There were many permutations of the description on the bottle, from an exact copy of what the Shabbona Grove Archaeological Project had uncovered to pictures of three of the family distillers such as you can see on a forum at antique-bottles.net here. An advertisement in the New York Evening Post from January 1939, shares part of the story of the family. (Blogger doesn't want to upload the picture here, so I'll put it in another post below.) Important to the dating of the bottle, however, is the fact that Harry Wilken did not join the family business until 1934. That gives our bottle a neat 4-year range of likely production, 1934-1938. 1938 coincides with both the date that the Whitall Tatum company was bought out and that the Wilken Family registered with a trademark not seen on this bottle (the trademark can be seen here).

Shabbona Grove in 1934-1938 would have had access to all sorts of remote goods via its connection on the Northern Illinois Railroad and Shabbona (proper)'s railway connection to Chicago. In this period following the economic crash of 1929, Shabbona was feeling the economic depression felt in rural places all around the nation. From 1903-1943, the Creamery, recreation hall, hotel, tin shop, and Methodist Church were all dismantled or torn down. Agriculture remained the main employer in the area, but such work was extremely exhausting and times were tough. Alcohol would've been an agreeable escape for many of the hardships known by the residents of Shabbona Grove, but the archaeology does not definitively suggest that consumption of the alcohol happened on the site or even in Shabbona Grove. The location of the bottle simply indicates its final deposition but does not leave many clues as to its compete journey.