Kearns-Gorsuch Glass Co. 1916-1917 Catalog

Bottle Typing/Diagnostic Shapes

1916-1917 Kearns-Gorsuch Bottle Co.
Bottle Catalog
HOME: Bottle Typing/Diagnostic Shapes: 1906 I.G.Co. Bottle Catalog

One of the best sources for determining bottle types based on the shape are old glass/bottle makers catalogs. An assortment of catalogs have been used in the preparation of this website to assist with bottle dating, and in particular, bottle typing - i.e., what a bottle likely contained or was used for. A very few bottle makers catalog were reproduced in the 1960s and 1970s, but all are long out of print and variably difficult to obtain. However, there is no better source for determining potential use and period shape names than these old catalogs.

Because of this utility to archaeologists and collectors alike, I have reproduced the entire 1916-1917 Kearns-Gorsuch Bottle Company (KGBCo.) catalog on this website; a catalog never reproduced to the authors knowledge although a few examples of it are known to be in the hands of collectors (empirical observations). This catalog was titled "The Packers' Handy Reference Book" (cover to the right) indicating the market niche the company was aiming towards. The KGBCo. was located in Zanesville, OH. and was a large producer of various bottles, though specialized in bottles and jars for commercial packers of various food products. This catalog shows the large array of food bottles and jars the company produced, as well as a smattering of other bottle types with lesser variety.

(The image of the company's Barnesville, OH. factory below is from a 1916 postcard. This factory was used from 1912 until it burned down in 1919. See the linked article on the company below.)

The title page notes that the catalog contains "Machine Made and Hand Blown" bottles although it appears that a large majority of the bottles - in the opinion of the author of this site - are machine-made. Some of the sauce bottles may have been mouth blown as may have been special orders for those customers who "...prefer shapes and designs of their own." (See page 9 of the catalog.) The timing of this catalog - 1916-1917 - is important as that was the time where the production of machine-made bottles was clearly dominating the bottle market, with mouth-blown containers an every shrinking minority. An important study of machine-made vs. mouth-blown production in the early 20th century noted that by 1917 roughly 5 to 10% of the bottles and jars produced in the U.S. were mouth or hand-blown; 90+% were produced by automatic and semi-automatic methods and would exhibit typical machine-made characteristics (Miller & Sullivan 1981).

For a complete history of the Kearns-Gorsuch Bottle Co. (and its predecessors) consult the following reference; a pdf copy of this article is included on this website (excerpted from the References Sources/Bibliography page):

Lockhart, Bill, Pete Schulz, Carol Serr, and Bill Lindsey. 2008d. The Kearns Glass Companies. Bottles and Extras 19(4):50-58 (July/August 2008). Covers the history - and related maker’s markings - of the various Kearns Glass Companies in Zanesville, OH. (primarily). This article is available on this website at: http://www.sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/KearnsGlassCo_BLockhart.pdf

For additional information on the bottles this company made, see the recently published book (2011) entitled Zanesville Glass by J. William Barrett II. Scores of illustrated bottle catalog pages from the 1908 and early 1910s (approximate; both catalogs are undated) KGBCo. catalogs - those pages which are not repeated in the following 1916-1917 catalog (which is reproduced in its entirety) - are reprinted in the later portions of this book. Zanesville Glass (an exceptional work!) also includes various bottle listing illustrations from a 1920 KGBCo. catalog as well as information from catalogs published in 1926, 1929 and 1931 after the company was acquired by Hazel-Atlas (1920). A comparison of these various catalogs makes for an interesting study of the time progression of designs, sizes, finishes, and much more. (See the References page for an email link to contact Bill Barrett about the availability of this fine work on all the various Zanesville, OH. glass makers and their products.)

Also of notable interest are pages 58, 104 and 122 which in combination outline the details of "The National Pure Food Law - The Pure Food and Drugs Act, June 30th, 1906, as Amended August 23, 1912." (Page 104 also includes a reference to the Gould Act of 1913 which specified the period for compliance to take place.) This is apparently an entire copy of the amended law which includes the original act details as well as a discussion of the "The Net Weight Law" amendment from 1912 which "...compels manufacturers to make a clear statement of the weight, volume or contents of their packages of food." The 1912 amendment, in hand with the Gould Amendment (March 3rd, 1913), required the clear labeling of the contents of bottled products. This is a useful dating tool for bottles having such (on the label or embossed in the glass) since very few bottled products had such designation prior to these laws which in combination required compliance no later than September 1914 (Lockhart 2006a).

All of the pages in the 1916-1917 KGBCo. catalog are hyperlinked below in the order they appear in the catalog. Click on each link to view an enlarged and of relatively high quality (around 400-600 KB each) copy of each two page scan (jpeg files). Each link description consists of the catalog page numbers and the general subject matter of those pages - as appropriate or useful - with the two pages generally split with a slash (/) mark.

If a user wishes to search for a particular bottle type (or other catalog listing) in the catalogs "Index," these pages are linked immediately below. Determine the page number of the item you are interested in then find that page link further down this page and click on it. Just be aware that some of the proprietary names that the company (and all bottle making companies) used are not always intuitively clear as to what type of bottle it is referring to:

Page 5 - Albion jars to Massage creams
Page 6 - Moulds to Worcestershire sauce

After viewing an enlarged scan, use the back arrow on your browser to return to this page. Unfortunately, a user can not move from one page scan to the next without returning to this page (a function of my limited web coding knowledge).

Thanks to the efforts of a kind user of this website the entire array of scans of the 1916-1917 KGBCo. catalog have been put together into one single, downloadable PDF file! It is 90 MB's in size so may take a while to download and view depending on the speed of your internet connection. It is available at this link:
Complete 1916-1917 Kearns-Gorsuch Bottle Co. catalog

End of the catalog.

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1/1/2024

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Bill Lindsey
Bureau of Land Management (retired) - Klamath Falls, Oregon
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