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| J. R. Watkins Co. Bottle. Probably 1920s or 1930s |
The J. R. Watkins Company began in 1868 as a small home-based business in Plainview, Minnesota, founded by entrepreneur Joseph Ray Watkins.
Watkins distributed many different types of household products including cleaning products, food extracts and flavorings, cosmetics, home remedies, and other products. (They did not actually make the bottles in which these products were contained.) As business increased, in 1885 the company operations were moved from Plainview to Winona, Minnesota.
The very first bottles sold are assumed to date as far back as 1868, but I doubt that the very earliest containers were actually embossed with the “Watkins” name, but would have likely been “generic” hand blown bottles with a paper label affixed to indicate contents. (If anyone has more information on this, please contact me!)
By the very early 1870s, as business continued to expand, it is likely that bottles were being embossed with Watkins or “J. R. Watkins Co.” The earliest versions of the Watkins bottles were made in aqua glass, were handmade (with a tooled lip) and have the lip fashioned for a cork closure. Later versions (I don’t know the exact year, but probably by the 1920s or early 1930s) have a threaded-style lip for a screw-on lid.
There are probably hundreds of slightly different Watkins bottle mold variants in existence that have been used over the last 140 years, with a variety of differences in font style, exact wording arrangement, size and shape of the bottle, and I imagine it would be a monumental task to find just one example of every single one of them.
Many of the bottles from the 1920s-1940s are quite common, and are usually in clear glass and rectangular in shape. Sometimes the embossed company name is in a cursive font, and sometimes in a plain “block style lettering”. White milkglass salve or “ointment jars” were also sold.
Here is the link.
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