In one of Bill Watterson’s better-known Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, the anthropomorphic tiger approaches his human counterpart in the midst of digging a hole. Covered in grime from a dig that has yielded nothing of monetary value, Calvin is nevertheless delighted with himself. “There’s treasure everywhere!” he exclaims in the final frame.
Allen Lamb was 9 years old when he first took a shovel to the trash dump behind his great-grandparents’ house in Marion. For the next few years, every day after school he would come home, throw his backpack down, grab his shovel, and head to the “trash pile.” Like Calvin, his efforts generated little in the way of grown-up currency, but he did find his first glass bottles, and with them the passion of a lifetime.
“They’d all be blue or green and odd shapes, and that is kind of what got me interested at first, and then I started going to trade lots and yard sales with my mom and started buying up bottles,” says Lamb.
Between the ages of 9 and 12, Lamb was in deep. Digging, trading, and studying bottles became his obsession. As he progressed into teenagerdom, however, his interests shifted. He tucked several boxes of his bottles away on a shelf in the closet of his bedroom, where they remained even after he moved out of the room and his little brother moved in. Years passed, the boxes unmoved, until a 21-year-old Lamb rediscovered them in 2018. While the collection was essentially worthless, it reawakened his passion.
“I started completely fresh,” says Lamb, now 24. “I started reaching out to people on Facebook, I started looking through eBay. Facebook was basically my go-to when it came to finding contacts and people that collect. I asked people around me, older guys around me in my town, and that really helped me a lot.”
Three year later, he boasts a catalogue surpassing 500 bottles, and while his original, preteen collection consisted of mostly national brands, he now specializes in Western North Carolina bottles and the history that accompanies them. His favorite is a W.O. Muller beer bottle from Asheville, made at the end of the 19th century.
“It’s the only one of its variation that is known amongst collectors,” says Lamb. “There’s another W.O. Muller bottle out there that is completely different from this one. This one says ‘Return to W.O. Muller and Company, Asheville NC,’ and it’s from the 1880s or early 1890s.”
Lamb says a way to tell the age of a glass bottle is by looking where the seam stops. “If it stops just below the lip, it’s blown in a mold. If it goes over the lip, it’s machine made. Anything before 1915-ish is blown in a mold. Anything after is machine made.”
The collector also has a Connelly Springs Mineral Water bottle from Connelly Springs, NC (near Morganton), a flask from Bonanza Saloon in Asheville, with the address 43 South Main Street embossed on the glass, and a C.H. Campbell acid-etched seltzer-water bottle, found at the “Coxe Avenue dump,” a buried garbage site in downtown Asheville that dates from the late 1890s and was uncovered last year.
“A construction worker just dug that out and sold it to my buddy,” says Lamb, “and I bought it from him for like $300. It’s got a little bit of damage, but it’s the only one known. Nobody has ever seen it before.”
Even so, the ideal find, no matter how rare, has no damage at all. “A crack or chip decreases the value almost 50 percent or more,” says Lamb.
“They actually covered that dump, buried it 30 to 40 feet under,” he adds. “Now nobody is going to get to see that history that is buried under there.”
Lamb collects bottles from 12 different counties, and estimates that roughly 200 bottles of his total collection originated in either Asheville, Hendersonville, Canton, or Brevard. He keeps them all in one shelving unit and two display cases, huddled together like subway passengers. Since his interest is in local bottles, he only travels to nearby shows to buy, sell, and trade, and has found that most of those who share his passion come from different generations.
“I am one of the only young collectors out there,” says Lamb. “I know a lot of people, and I would say that I don’t know anyone else [who collects] that’s my age, besides one other person.
“It’s a dying hobby these days, and I hate to see it — but not many people in this generation care about history, especially old bottles. I’m just trying to preserve the history and have a really great collection along the way.”
Allen Lamb, Marion. Contact the collector at allen.lamb1997@gmail.com.