Two Rescued Soda Bottles

With untold courage and at great risk to my personal safety,[1] I rescued two old soda bottles from the eroding bank of a creek that flows into the Deep River. A hollow bottle-shaped impression in the bank showed that a third had already fallen into the water and been swept away.

The first bottle has no label. It is covered in an embossed ropelike design:


(Click on images to enlarge)





The lettering on the bottom of the bottle reads: "DESIGN PAT'D MAR. 3, 25/C 889/Duraglas/9 [symbol] 5/I."

Googling that patent date for a soda-bottle design brings up images of Nehi soda bottles, including ones nearly identical to this bottle. So I'm pretty sure this is a Nehi bottle. Apparently bottle collectors call these embossed ropes the silk-stocking design. What little history I can turn up on Nehi suggests that this bottle dates between 1925 and 1955.


The second bottle still has most of its painted label:





There is lettering on the bottom, but nothing informative.



A capital G inside a square, and then: "320/1/CONTENTS 10 FL. OZ."

Here's a Waverly advertisement from the Hammond Times of March 20, 1952:



The soda was manufactured and distributed by the Superior Beverage Company, 226 E. 21st Street, Gary, Indiana. The Superior Beverage Company building is still standing there …


Image from Google street view.

… or at least it was in the summer of 2019, when the Googlemobile went through.

A couple of urban explorers put a video on YouTube of themselves exploring the derelict building, but they didn't find anything interesting.


That's all the creek-bank archeology I have for now.

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[1] I might have gotten my feet wet.