The pickup pulled up along side at the Spokane landfill. The back was stacked high with burlap bags and the driver began dumping broken glass out of the bags and neatly folding them. I walked over to suggest that since it was all glass, it could be recycled, and then I got a better look at the fragments.
There were a variety of intact necks from bottles and flasks and some larger pieces with embossed writing. The first one I picked up read “Spokane Falls, W.T.” (the W.T. stands for Washington Territory). I asked if I could dig around in the glass and was given permission. Within minutes I had found several other fragments with the W.T. marking and others that had all or part of the word “saloon.” I asked the guy where he had found all these broken bottles, and then I got the story….
His grandparents had purchased a house outside of Spokane in the 1920’s. The previous owner had been an old bootlegger and the former chicken house had been left full of these old bottles. No one in the family had any interest in chickens, so the bottles had been left undisturbed. When the grandparents passed away the family decided to sell the property and thought that the place would sell better if the buildings all empty, so earlier that day they had started emptying the chicken house. It was completely full of bottles and a bunch of old burlap bags, and there was way too much to fit in the pickup truck, so the son had come up with a great idea on how the could make it all fit. They would fill a burlap bag with bottles and then beat the bag with a piece of pipe. The broken bottles took up far less space than the intact ones, and by spending only a couple of hours labor they managed to fit it all into one trip to the dump….
Postscript: For those of you who do not keep up with the bottle market, territorial bottles (and particularly territorial saloon bottles) are worth from hundreds to thousands of dollars each.