The National Bottle Museum

I wrote this post last June but I was saving it until I got my other New York trip posts ready to publish. Still hasn't happened. Maybe it never will. In the name of doing what you can and not worrying about the rest, I'm publishing this post.

Bet you didn't know there was a museum out there dedicated to old, glass bottles. There is. One that is national, in fact.

The National Bottle Museum just happens to be located on the main street of Ballston Spa, not a five-minute drive from the Middle Brother's abode. Also, it was free to visit. How could we resist?

I'm addicted to museums. For real. If there's a museum, I am there. Even if it's a tiny, poorly-funded museum dedicated to old, glass bottles. Do I care about old, glass bottles? Not really. Did I really want to go the National Bottle Museum? Yes! I would have gone by myself, gladly.

I learned distinguishing marks of old bottles and how you can tell about when a bottle was made. I also learned more about the different techniques they used and how they put together teams of men in order to maximize the glass bottle output. Factories would make millions of bottles each year, each one made by hand. They had an impressive collection of old bottles and an enthusiastic staff.

Apparently the best place to dig for bottles is in an old privy. Gross. Good news is, they're old enough that the only thing down there is really fertile dirt. Don't think about it too hard. Glass bottles were imprinted with the factories name. They wanted their bottles back and it was considered stealing to use the bottle for anything else. Imagine it's winter and there's five feet of snow outside. You can't get the bottle back to the factory, you can't use it for anything else, you don't have enough room to let it just hang around your tiny home. What do you do? Through it down the privy hole. The deeper you dig, the older the bottles get. There's nothing better to a bottle collector than an untouched old privy.

This is the part where you thank your lucky stars that old, glass bottle collecting is not something you're interested in.

Elle and Izzy struggled a bit with it. The museum curator was long-winded and not particularly adept at keeping the interest of small children. They did have a rather nice miniature of a glass manufacturing setup. I picked up Elle so she could see better and explained to her that they made glass bottles by blowing air down a tube, making the glass expand from a ball to a container. I used my hand to explain to her how it was done. A few mornings later, Elle and Izzy were hanging out in the family room while I was pretending to still be asleep. I wasn't, of course (Aunt Megan! Aunt Megan! Are you awake, Aunt Megan?). The girls usually played silly games while they waited for their parents to realize they were up and about. I was drifting, not really paying attention to whatever game they were playing, until I recognized the sound effect I had used to explain to Elle the expanding of a bottle. I perked up, and what did I hear? Elle explaining to Izzy how glass bottles are made! I think that might just be my proudest Aunt moment.