Bottled Memories

I found these bottles in 1969 under the house where I grew up near Lexington, Nebraska. It was being torn down after nearly 100 years on farmland by the Platte River. Their design shows that they were made before 1910. They likely were emptied and tossed under the house by family and friends of Michael Delahunty who had been a railroad worker for the transcontinental railroad which came through Plum Creek, in 1866. Plum Creek was later renamed Lexington.

Part of that house had been the original section house for the Plum Creek train station. He had used a team of horses drag the section house, mounted on skids, over two miles to the site where I found these bottles. Later he built a two-story addition to the structure for increased living space. Michael had lived there until his passing in 1930.

My family moved into this house around 1953, and I remember as a child talking with members of his extended family and occasionally finding old coins in the farm yard that dated to the 1800’s. I was quite excited in finding the bottles under the house. In a sense, they gave me a physical connection to those who had lived in the previous century.