SOUTH CAROLINA DISPENSARY BOTTLES
The South Carolina Dispensary system, in operation from 1893 to 1907, was a nearly unique and completely unsuccessful attempt to control alcohol abuse by placing a state’s entire retail liquor trade into the hands of its government. Touted by its sponsor, Governor “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, as a means of encouraging temperance, guaranteeing purity of product, and returning alcohol revenues to the citizens, the dispensary was born as an eleventh hour compromise between pro- and anti-Prohibition forces in the state legislature. The measure as enacted satisfied neither side, and the dispensary remained a volatile issue in state politics until its repeal 14 years later.
The system functioned by buying up wholesale spirits from local and out-of-state manufacturers, repackaging or relabeling them at a Columbia distribution center, and retailing them to the public through locally operated dispensaries. Beer, which was never bottled by the dispensary, was sold privately under special license, and alcohol of any sort could be brought into the state for individual consumption. In the beginning, all liquors were sold in special dispensary bottles, but by the turn of the century, the dispensary was handling hundreds of products, many of them pre-packaged national brands.
Litigation and often violent public resistance (an 1894 “whiskey rebellion” left three dead) plagued the system in its early years. By 1905 the internal corruption had become so pervasive that a legislative investigating committee recommended closing the system as unmanageable. Despite the now-handsome profit that it was returning to the state treasury, the South Carolina dispensary was abolished by the Carey-Cothran Act of the state legislature in 1907.
South Carolina Dispensary bottles came in three basic shapes: Union flasks, Jo-Jo flasks, and cylindrical bottles and jugs. Bottles made before 1899 were embossed with palmetto trees ([Fig. 22]A and C), and those made after 1899, when public disapproval forced the removal of the state symbol from liquor bottles, were embossed with an intertwined SCD monogram. Bottles were manufactured for the dispensary by over 20 different glass factories, but after 1902 all but one brief contract went to the Carolina Glass Company of Columbia.
Figure 22. South Carolina Dispensary bottles. A. Cylindrical palmetto bottle, 1893-1899. B. Monogrammed Jo-Jo flask with embossed CFLG Co basemark, 1899-1902. C. Palmetto Jo-Jo flask, 1893-1899.
FOOD CONTAINERS
Although olive oil, pickles, and other foods that do not require sterilization have been packed in glass and ceramic containers for centuries, the preserving of hot foods in airtight glass or metal containers is a comparatively recent development. Housewives in the eighteenth century knew how to preserve fruits by boiling them in glass jars that were subsequently corked and sealed with wax, glue, or pitch, but the idea of canning as we know it was popularized by Nicholas Appert, a French confectioner who in 1809 won a prize from Napoleon for his method of keeping food fresh for soldiers in the field. Appert succeeded in preserving over 50 kinds of food, including meats and vegetables, and published an essay detailing his method of boiling food in a wide-mouthed jar and sealing it with a firmly driven cork. The process was quickly copied in England and America, where seafood, fruit, and pickles were first packed for wholesale in New York and Boston about 1820.
A major problem with Appert’s method of preserving in glass was the irregular finish of hand-made bottles, which often prevented the cork stopper from forming an absolutely airtight seal. For commercial packers, an early and lasting solution was the tin-plated canister, patented in England in 1810 and in the United States in 1825. An inexpensive and effective closure for glass containers had to await John Mason’s 1858 patent of the threaded jar seal, which consisted of a molded screw thread that allowed the cap to seal on the shoulder rather than the uneven lip of the jar. Home canners still use a similar screw-top jar today.