Bottled up

There might be a little dust on these bottles, but it's not surprising. Charlie Nenninger has been collecting them for more than 30 years.

He started his collection when his dad plowed up a Coke bottle from Lutesville Bottling Works in their yard in Advance, Mo. That little soda bottle sparked an interest and now he estimates he has about 4,000 bottles in his collection.

No bottle is too big or too small. Nenninger has one bottle that's barely bigger than his thumb, which he brought back from Ireland. It sits just a few feet away from a five-gallon glass water jug from Hinckley and Schmitt made in 1928.

"And they're still in business," he said, holding the heavy jug upside down to read the letters etched in the glass.

The water company is now called Hinckley Springs Bottled Water and is still based in Chicago. The water jug is now clouded with age and handling.

One of Charlie Nenninger's newest and proudest additions to his collection is a bottle from the ABC Bohemian Brewery. The company was eventually bought by Anheuser-Busch.

Nenninger has dug through landfills, under houses and traded tools to add bottles to his collection. His most recent -- and now his favorite -- is one he got while on a trip to Illinois in December. The bottle came from ABC Bohemian bottling company in St. Louis.

ABC bottling -- the American Brewing Co. -- was founded in 1890 in St. Louis by the Koehler family, according to historian Frank Nickell.

"They had a Czech background, and thus used the brand name: ABC Bohemian Beer," he said in an e-mail.

The company changed hands a few times, and in 1940 it went bankrupt. The Anheuser-Busch Brewery bought the company and bulldozed the buildings to make a parking lot at its St. Louis location, he said. Anheuser-Busch confirmed it bought the land from the last owner.

Nenninger makes a patent-pending clamp remover and travels the area selling his products. He traded some of them for the ABC bottle.

For now he keeps it in a Tropicana Orange Juice carton for protection, but eventually it will join the others on display at the Brick Street Antique shop.

His booth at the back of the shop is a cloud of old Coke bottles, Stag bottles, Avon bottles and some more rare ones, like a nondescript brown bottle he thinks was made before the Civil War.

"Here's the oldest bottle I've got," he said, holding the slender brown bottle up to the light. He pointed to the bubbles in the glass and showed how the neck is slightly crooked. "It's a wine bottle. It's hand blown."

Nenninger has bought books and looked up facts on the Internet to learn more about the bottles he finds. He doesn't belong to a collector's association and hasn't been to any conventions yet, but said he would love to go when he gets more time.

The really old bottles, he said, have a seam -- called a mold mark -- up each side that stops about an inch below the top of the bottle where the makers had to hand fasten the top of the bottle because they couldn't make a smooth finish with a mold.

"The oldest kind are three-piece molds," he said. And most of the younger bottles have a mold mark that runs from the bottom all the way to the top.

Several things can give a bottle's age: the mold mark, marks on the bottom of the glass or the shape of the neck and opening. A bottle that was sealed with a cork most likely dates back before the 1920s when automatic bottling machines became popular and bottles went to the screw cap.

Nenninger moved the bottles to the antique shop a few years ago. Up until then they were housed in a shed at his house in Advance.

"I built the shed just for the bottles in 1970-something," he said.

Nenninger collects bottles because he thinks they are interesting. He sells them because he can make a little money. It's a hobby, and it has turned into a little job, he said.

charris@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 246