Renaissance Woman

Not to be confused with Hiram Walker’s Club Whisky of Ontario, Walker’s Kilmarnock (Scotch) Whisky is what we now know as Johnnie Walker’s. Production of Walker’s whisky started in in the 1820s when a young Johnnie Walker started blending his own whiskies in the back of his grocery store, which he started when he was 14 years old after his father died. The company remained in the family until the 1920s. In the 1860s, the Walker company started using square bottles – they were stronger and more could fit into a case so they were cheaper and easier to ship (because of their proximity to the famous Glasgow and Greenock ports, sailing Captains could act as agents for the company and the brand became popular all over the world after this time). In 1865, the first commercial blend of Walker’s was introduced under the name “Old Highland Whisky”. The “Old Highland Whisky” and “Walker’s Kilmarnock Whisky” names were used until around 1908 when the whisky was re-branded as “Johnnie Walker’s Whis...

I'm working on an archaeological collection that was found on the new St. Paul's Hospital property in the False Creek Flats area of Vancouver, BC - just southeast of where Main St. (Westminster Ave.) and Prior St. used to cross. I'm only providing the history of the property here, because it is fascinating and I wanted to share it with someone. History of the False Creek Flats Property  Excavations that provided the artifacts for an archaeological analysis are estimated to be from Lots 10-15 on the south side of Prior Street in Vancouver's False Creek Flats region (east of Main St., on and to the right of the number 25 in Figure 1). These equate to the addresses between 234 and 248 Prior Street between Park Lane and Gore Avenue. This 1912 Fire Insurance map clearly shows the buildings within these lots. And the original water line can be seen cutting through the property. Figure 1. 1912 Fire Insurance Map showing the properties of Interest - Main Street is on the left (...

Newly discovered characteristics of some semi-automatic machine-made bottles. For decades, I have read that there is "no way to tell whether a bottle was produced on a semiautomatic or fully automatic machine, aside from the Owens scar" (SHA bottle research website Owens Company Part 1 p.174 summarizing Jones and Sullivan 1989 ). With the utmost respect to my predecessors, this is not entirely true. But let me be clear, the characteristics presented here don't cover them all, I'm sure. There were lots of different machines. As mentioned in a previous post , I am working on a collection of bottles from Vancouver, BC, that are tightly dated from ca. 1905  to ca.1913-16. Within this collection I have examples of mould blown, semi-automatic, and fully automatic machine-made bottles. And sometimes you CAN tell the difference. The Ashley machine is pretty straight-forward and it seems most other British semi-automatics followed their basic structure. The first semi-automat...

I've started working on a new project. I have a collection of bottles from an archaeological context in Vancouver. A number of them are, I believe, some of the very first fully automatic machine-made bottles from Europe. They are providing me with some very interesting data and I'm going to share some of my preliminary findings with you here. This study is part of an Arrowstone Archaeological Research and Consulting Ltd project, and is being conducted by myself, Sandi Ratch . Here is the first post I'm going to share - some background and some colour: The Earliest Owen’s Machine-Made Bottles in Europe 1907-1914: Seven Years That Changed the Face of the European Bottle-Making Industry Sandi Ratch An archaeological collection of hundreds of bottles from a dump site in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats has offered a unique opportunity to study some of the earliest Owens Machine -made bottles from Europe (check out the link for a good history of the Owens company). Most of the arc...