Marin `Unbottled'
Museum explores county's history through its bottling industries
About a year ago, a visitor to the Marin History Museum came up to Heather Powell and started talking about bottles. Specifically, he wanted to the see the museum's bottles.
“I thought, wow,” says Powell, curator of the museum's collections. Bottles?
As it turns out, the museum has more than 400 bottles, mostly donated by people who found them on a beach or digging in their yard or other random places, that have rarely seen the light of day since. So there was no lack of material.
And if that one bottle enthusiast wanted to see the museum's bottles, Powell figured others might want to, too.
The result is “Unbottled,” a new exhibit that explores the origins of Marin County's various bottling industries and that will be on display through Aug. 6 at Boyd Gate House in San Rafael. In addition to bottles from the museum's collection and loans from local people and businesses, the exhibit features artifacts, photographs, advertising, pottery and paintings related to Marin's bottling history.
“There are so many interesting things to talk about when it comes to bottles,” she says. “Each bottle had a story not only associated with its industry, but also the story of how they were found. I was thinking about what these bottle say about collecting.”
Bottles `trickle in'
It's not as if the museum even set out to have a bottle collection. It just happened. “Bottles keep trickling in. They trickle in all the time. It's very interesting. People find bottles everywhere,” Powell says.
And people are not only delighted to find them, she discovered, they're also delighted to share them. “They're very excited. There are a lot of bottle collectors who are really crazy about bottles,” she says.
There's more to bottles than one might expect. Which made deciding which bottles to feature in the exhibit a bit of a challenge.
Bottles can be categorized by their industry, such as dairy — there have been more than 400 dairies in Marin over the years — beer, spirits, seltzer/soda and pharmacy. Sizes, shapes, textures and color all played important parts in bottling.
“You wanted to be able to tell what kind of bottle it was through touch. So if you're in the dark at night and you're reaching for a medicine bottle back in the 1880s, you wanted to know what you were grabbing,” Powell says.
It's what prompted CocaCola to copyright its bottle shape, she observes. “They wanted Coke to be identifiable by the shape of the bottle and the feel of the bottle in your hand,” she says.
Telling stories
“There are so many interesting things to talk about when it comes to bottles. Each bottle had a story not only associated with its industry, but also the story of how they were found.”
— Heather Powell, curator of Marin History Museum collections
Some bottles that aren't embossed or have labels indicating they're from Marin are in the exhibit as a dramatically lit installation, but “Unbottled” is mostly focused on bottles that speak to Marin and organized by three themes — nourishment, enjoyment and health.
San Rafael was known for companies that bottled sparkling elixirs using water from the San Rafael Creek, such as Marin Soda Works, which produced numerous syrup-infused “temperance drinks,” and that later became Klammer
& Malz's Marin Soda and Bottling Works, as well as Buffalo Soda Works, later purchased by the Borello Bros. Co., which advertised carbonated beverages made from the “famous Tamalpais Natural Mineral Springs” — all businesses founded by immigrants.
As she researched the exhibit, even Powell get swept up in the bottle frenzy, enthralled by a blue seltzer bottle from the Blue Rock Inn in Larkspur, now home to the Left Bank, on loan from Larkspur resident Dennis Gilardi.