Bottle Diving: Underwater Exploration With a Touch of Glass

I have encountered and recovered plenty of glass bottles in my lifetime of scuba diving. But I didn’t get into bottle diving intentionally.

The first incident was when I was diving in Lake Erie in the area around Buffalo, New York.  The dive location was just outside a break wall near the Peace Bridge, where Lake Erie empties into the Niagara River.

My main objective was to look for old coins that apparently were deposited when a ship wrecked in the area.  The vessel was never identified, but the local club discovered the debris in the early 1960s.

While searching the area, I would come across various pieces of bottles, such as the neck or bottom. But every once in a while, the gods smiled on me, and I would find a complete specimen worth bringing to the surface.

The first was a large crockery bottle with the name SARSAPARILLA and below that was the manufacturer BURR & WATERS.  Sometime later, I was fortunate to locate a small blue glass bottle with HOWELL & SMITH, below was written BUFFALO.  Finally, I discovered another blue glass bottle with a damaged top but was complete enough to read LANCASTER GLASS WORKS NY.

After locating all three of these bottles, I wanted to learn more about their age and value.  For this reason, I contacted the Buffalo Historical Society sending along photos and pencil rubbings of the raised letters on the bottles.

The reply stated that Burr & Waters appeared in the city directory from 1839 to 1853.  Howell & Smith was in business from 1853 to 1864.

The three bottles mentioned along with some disappointments.

I was also told that the complete blue bottle was worth somewhere around $35, but that was back in the early '70s.  I took the crockery one to a local Antiques Road Show, and they estimated it around $300.

Around that same time, I was diving on a submerged garbage dump off the bank of the St. Clair River and found a blob top soda bottle as well as a couple of medicine bottles.  The blob top soda bottle displayed the name of ZADDACK BROS, WYANDOTTE, MICH, and CITY BOTTLING WORKS.  By contacting the Wyandotte Museums in Michigan I learned this bottle was for soda water and manufactured from 1884 to 1890.

Bottles from the St. Clair River.

The square medicine bottle has the inscriptions HAZELTINE & CO, PISO'S CURE, FOR CONSUMPTION.  In researching this one, I learned the contents contained a combination of marijuana, chloroform, and alcohol and started production in the 1870s.

Lastly, the small round bottle has the wording MRS WINSLOW'S SOOTHING SYRUP and was produced by CURTIS & PERKINS PROPRIETORS.  Once again, the contents included Opium, which probably provided the "soothing" product in the mixture.  This one dates back to the late 1800s.

When I was transferred from Ohio to Florida by my company, I had the opportunity to dive with Mel Fisher on the Atocha and Margarita Galleons.  We would go out for a week of exploring and dock at Key West on the weekends. During one of these weekends, seeing there was very little to occupy my time, I went for a dive around the dock area and picked up an old black glass ale bottle.  There were no markings on the bottle, but it was of a three-piece construction, which dated it to around the early 1880s.

Black glass bottle from a marina in Key West, Florida.

More recently, my son Gary and I had been exploring various springs in North Florida and heard about a camp up by the Suwannee River, so we decided to travel up there to try it out.  We brought along our 17-foot Boston Whaler to see just what spots might be interesting along the river.

Upon heading west from the camp, we came upon an old former railroad bridge that looked like it dated back to the early 20th Century.  It was no longer in operation, for it had been stripped of its tracks and rotated, so it was perpendicular to the river, not across it.

Old swing bridge over the Suwannee River.

We thought this might be a good place to dive in that passengers on trains passing by may have tossed items into the river.  We dove around the pedestal base, and I only came up with a small whisky bottle with the inscription on the bottom of PAUL JONES and a date of 1905.

After this minor find, we noticed a grouping of boulders about 300 yards downstream of the bridge.  Thinking this could be a location that debris may get caught while being washed down the river, we moved over to investigate.

Old Paul Jones whisky bottle dated 1905.

Well, it didn't take long before we were picking up bottles two and three at a time to the point that we filled two large mesh bags in a matter of half an hour.  We had more whisky bottles, old Coke bottles, and wine bottles that were all at least 50 to 75 years old.  Some of the Coke bottles had the name of a nearby town on them.

When we arrived back at the camp and were having dinner at the main lodge, we commented to the other divers how many bottles we found and were immediately asked where we located them.  We told them the area where we were diving but also added, "you can go there, but we got them all."

We went up again the next year, but we were right. We did get them all except one or two.