Finally! After a few weeks of upstairs demo work with nothing much revealed/discovered for it but a lot of original (read that: archaic) knob-and-tube electrical wiring, a really old rat trap (with a really old rat skull) and some equally aged walnut shells, this morning I went into the destruction zone for a peek around and while peering down into the chasm between the kitchen and dining room that had been revealed by the removal of some floorboarding I saw something laying on a stud brace against the inside of the north wall of the house, just out of arm’s reach.
Finally fishing it out with the aid of a saw blade I found it was an old bottle of musilage adhesive replete with paper label intact detailing something about a “Ca—g’s (name obscured by dried glue) “”Quick Fill” tip that “takes mucilage to the upper end of sponge at once.”
How old? Well, it could be as much as 123 years old, because below the feature description of the tip it reads “Pat. June 27, 1886. December 28, 1886.” And below that it states “and Patent applied for.”
Here’s a pic showing both sides:
As you can see there’s a lot of leakage that has dried to the bottle, which still contains a fair amount of its contents. The reason the label is relatively intact is because however it got down there in the wall, it landed label side down, which protected it while the nineteenth century progressed to the twentieth, and onward to the twenty-first. Dood.
On the other side of the bottle (pictured on the right) the labeling is very obscured by the dried gunk.
It’s a thick and sturdy bottle with no seams (a sure sign it’s an oldie) and I’m probably going to attempt to remove some of the caked-on spillage, but at the first sign my efforts are adding damage rather than removing gunk I’m just going to leave her alone.
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