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Bordwell & Co. Green Soda, 1856-1858 [184672]

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Bottles & Insulators Start Price:2,500.00 USD Estimated At:5,000.00 - 10,000.00 USD
Bordwell & Co. Green Soda, 1856-1858 [184672]
SOLD
4,000.00USD+ (1,000.00) buyer's premium + applicable fees & taxes.
This item SOLD at 2024 Sep 09 @ 16:58UTC-7 : PDT/MST
UNCLAIMED MERCHANDISE: In the event that a successful bidder has paid in full for their merchandise but fails to settle outstanding shipping invoices or make arrangements for merchandise pickup within 60 days, HWAC reserves the right to declare the merchandise forfeited. This forfeiture will result in the merchandise becoming the property of HWAC and the successful bidder shall have no claim to or rights over the forfeited merchandise.
An old discovery soda by John Fountain, but a new historical informational discovery! A Modern-Day Historical Discovery Yields a Special New Addition to the California Gold Rush Soda Bottle List!

Bordwell & Co. Green Pontiled Soda Bottle, (Oroville, Cal. 1856-1858)
By Fred Holabird, copyright 2024
Listed originally by John Fountain. Listed on Internet soda data base as “unlocated.”
New research of a Gold Rush era pontiled soda bottle lands identification to a rare soda bottle that was first, and only, listed by John Fountain.
Bordwell & Co./ Mineral Water, Dark Green, Pontil, applied top soda bottle.
Bordwell & Deamer began their mineral water, ale and porter business in about February of 1856, when the first advertisement was found in a local newspaper. The business was located on the corner of Pine and Robinson streets in Oroville.
At the time, Oroville was a new, bustling town in the “flatland” adjacent to placer gold ground including Bidwell Bar, only 27 miles from Marysville. The town got its start in 1853, originally known as “Ophir”, had a Post Office by 1854. Town lots were developed by Ralph Bird in 1855, selling for $100 per lot. It grew so quickly that the County Seat moved to Oroville in November 1856 and the population doubled to 4,000 by 1858. It was during this “boom” that Bordwell and Deamer got their start in the Mineral Water business, just one and a half blocks from the future Court House site.
The company was alternately known as Bordwell & Co. and Deamer & Bordwell. The pair were good at marketing, and each summer the pair brought a dozen or two bottles of mineral water to the local newspaper office, for which a “thank you” was always published. For those not familiar with the region, it gets tremendously hot in the summer, exceeding 100 degrees every year. The pair also paid for print advertisements, though they were not run regularly.
The competition appeared to be a soda “wagon” run by William Givanden of Marysville, who advertised that he worked the Bidwell, Oroville, Thompson Flat and Lynchburg route.
Bordwell’s advertisements often were located spatially in the newspapers right next to some prominent gold businesses, such as Justh & Hunter, whose firm manufactured gold bars. Several were found on the 1857 gold treasure “Ship of Gold,” the SS Central America, recovered in the 1980s.
It is quite probable that Bordwell & Deamer built their own building, as it appears to have been acquired right after Ralph Bird began selling lots. They also had a livery, which housed their horse, a necessity when selling a wagon load of heavy mineral water, ale and porter bottles. At one point, it may also have carried their soda apparatus.
In December, 1856, William Sheridan broke into the livery and stole their horse. He was arrested in Grass Valley and the horse returned. The story he gave was convoluted. He was going to team up with Charley Hardy, who stood watch for him while he broke into the barn and stole the horse. The pair were going to go to Salt Lake then on to the East. Sheridan was an Army volunteer in California in 1848, then worked the Indian Wars of 1851, then mined the goldfields until 1854, when he started his life of crime. Arrested for larceny in 1854 in Mokelumne Hill, he escaped prison, went to Sonora where he got in with a “band of horse thieves” who operated throughout the state, particularly the Mother Lode region. Was Tiburcio Vasquez one of this huge notorious gang?
Clearly trying to expand their business, by 1857 their advertisements touted taking their teams and products “over the different roads in the County” to “supply their line, promptly, and in quantities to suit.”
In 1858, things changed. On April 20 they began advertising the soda water apparatus for sale, but not the property. The company had been bogged down by unpaid bills, and on June 1st advertised that they would no longer sell on credit. That same month, his neighbor B.W. Allison lost the three adjacent town lots to a Sheriff’s sale, indicating an instability in Oroville business. No more advertisements for Bordwell & Deamer, or Deamer & Bordwell were found after 1858.
Deamer apparently took over the business, buying out Bordwell sometime in 1858 or early 1859. Bordwell left the region, and was never recorded in a US census. Deamer advertised the soda factory for sale, “with or without the real estate,” in March 1861. The article indicated he had been running the soda works for several years, “dispensing soda, ginger-pop, etc. to the denizens of Oroville and the surrounding country for the past four or five years. We are sorry to see him ‘pop’ out of business.” By late March, his advertisement stated “soda factory for sale cheap … on reasonable terms”. He gave up total sale, and by late May had taken on another partner, Wallis. But this time, the pair expanded the business to include a wine and liquor business, which they bought from E. Parker. The pair continued to produce and advertise their soda water and ginger beer. Little printed material is found between 1862 and 1864, when it was reported that the soda business in Oroville was “full blast.”
William E. Deamer moved to Grass Valley within the next couple years, possibly taking the soda water apparatus with him. He sold his interest in the Oroville liquor business and bought the Snug Saloon in Grass Valley about 1866-1867. By 1870, he advertised the manufacture of soda water at Grass Valley, and interestingly, Farrell lived with he and his family. Farrell later operated his own soda works in Grass Valley. Deamer and Farrell’s Grass Valley embossed soda bottles are well known to collectors.
Who are these guys, Bordwell and Deamer?
Bordwell is a bit of a mystery. A possible tie is a store in St. Louis, Butte County (a gold mining camp) that burned down in August, 1854, owned by Bordwell and Moore. The pair had the largest loss of the fire for the town at $12,000. Did Bordwell go to Ophir, the new gold camp in Butte County and buy a soda apparatus and start anew? We may never know. When he left the firm in about late 1858, did he “retire” to Miners Ranch on the road from Oroville to Bidwell Bar? Is this even the same guy? Either way, even this man is “gone” by 1860.
William E. Deamer is much easier to track, as noted above. He had two children, one of which, William W. Deamer, went to the University of California and graduated with honors, becoming a very successful California businessman. Deamer kept the soda business, and put out his products in at least two different embossed bottles from Grass Valley.
And there is where the new story begins…..
On a dark, cold, dreary day, a man and his son were looking for old bottles along Deer Creek as it flowed into Grass Valley. It was 1969, and the old bottle “craze” was in its very infancy. People were just discovering the wonderful and beautiful colors and shapes of old bottles from the nineteenth century. There were bitters, medicines, beers, whiskey bottles … all in a seemingly endless wide array of colors and shapes. Bottles shaped like barrels – some like cabins; funny looking sloped shoulder bottles known as “soda bottles” in deep blues and greens – and the amber and yellow whiskey bottles with names embossed on them from San Francisco! It was too good to be true.
Very few reference works had been published, and those that did exist were crude listings. John Fountain’s book written from his home in Amador City in the center of the Mother Lode listed many of these new and unusual bottles of which folks were not familiar. Bob Ferraro in Las Vegas wrote about what he found next to the churches in Virginia City. Others did the same. Curiously, Fountain’s book listed the Bordwell & Co. green pontiled soda bottle, without geographic location. He was the only one through history until now to list this bottle.
It was in this setting, in the very first decade of serious collecting, that the man and his son set out on Deer Creek looking for old bottles. As they got closer to Grass Valley, they found a drainage tunnel along the creek. Where did it go? Maybe it was a trash drainage tunnel……. In they went…
And then…
“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times…” Charlie D. got it right, even though he wrote it a year after Bordwell quit the soda business. A coincidence? Hmmm… Let’s see…..
Up the tunnel they went, tramping through mud and water, not understanding exactly where they were. A broken glass shard here, some really old trash there, … and finally a few unbroken nineteenth century bottles. Within an hour, they knew it was a bonanza of antique bottles. Sodas, ladies’ legs; whiskey bottles , bitters bottles, … they were all here. Jubilation! But somebody heard them from above, said “what’s going on down there?” and called the Sheriff. Apparently there was an air vent to the tunnel that went up into a Grass Valley saloon.
Oops.
The Sheriff marched them up the street in muddy clothes and all to the dismal interrogation room, such as it was in 1969. “What the hell are you doing?” the Sheriff asked. “We’re just looking for old bottles, and had no idea we were causing any trouble, let alone the possibility of trespassing. We were just exploring a tunnel from the creek and found the bottles.”
In 1969, that was one wild story. In fact, totally unbelievable. But the shocked father and son were desperate to tell the truth, and this was a whole new thing to the Sheriff. “Go home!” he said with steadfast firmness. But he forgot to say “Don’t come back,” … within the week, the old bottles in the tunnel were mysteriously cleaned out. They showed up at a Santa Rosa bottle show later that year and won a display award … from two guys the collectors had never heard of.
And so began the collecting craze.
One of those bottles found in the tunnel was the Gold Rush soda bottle in deep green, Bordwell & Co., an Oroville soda bottle of 1856-1858 that was probably taken by Bordwell’s partner Deamer to Grass Valley, where he used it again (“recycled”) at his Grass Valley soda works, and maybe others, until none were left.
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