Hundreds of antique bottles unearthed during a construction project at the Emporia Senior Center will be auctioned Saturday during a fund-raising event for the center.
A ham-and-bean feed will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The meal will be $3.50 and will include unlimited servings of ham and beans with cornbread, plus one dessert.
The bottle auction will begin at 2 p.m. with Gail Hancock as auctioneer.
Proceeds from the meal and auction will go to help offset the losses from the mill-levy cut from 2005, according to center Director Susan Riley.
The bottles surfaced during the excavation next to the building in July 2005. Many of them were about 10 feet underground. Riley had the dirt around them hauled to private property, where she and a Center board member picked through the dirt and salvaged the bottles.
“We have all those out now and are washing them up,” Riley said earlier this month.
A few of the bottles pre-date 1900.
“There’s one, Dr. Jayne’s Miracle Kidney, Liver, Bladder Cure, stamped on the bottle is 1846,” she said. “A lot of the bottles are embossed with some wording of some kind, and there’s just hundreds of them.”
After talking with residents about the history of the area, Riley said they believe that the bottles may have been buried by a local man who picked up trash downtown and unloaded it at the corner of 12th Avenue and East Street during the early to mid-1900s. That man was Bert Rich, who referred to himself in a newspaper article as the biggest “colored contractor west of the Mississippi.” Rich, who had been a railroad worker as well as a contractor, owned extensive property on the northeast side of Emporia and drove a horse-drawn dray down Commercial Street to collect merchants’ trash.
Some of the bottles carry the name of the Morris Drug Store, a pharmacy that was located in the 400 block of Commercial Street.
Betty Matson, who delivers meals for the center, worked at the drug store when pharmacists Warren Morris and O.D. Harris were filling prescriptions in glass bottles.
“They’d be old, because I was 16 when I worked there and I’m 80 years old now,” Matson said, remembering her days at the store. “Back then, a pharmacist was altogether different than they are now. They had to mix the medicines and fill their capsules. It wasn’t already made.”
Most of the Morris Drug bottles and a host of others have been boxed and stored at the center. A few are on display in a locked case at the center until the auction, when Riley hopes they will be sold at fair prices and hauled to other homes.
“If nothing else, it’s going to clear out the closet,” Riley said.