The history of one of the earliest industries in the United States is bottled in a museum in downtown Ballston Spa.
The National Bottle Museum sits in an unimposing two-story building along Milton Avenue in Ballston Spa.
While a museum dedicated to the history and preservation of glass bottles may not sound all that interesting, Executive Director Chris Leonard begs to differ.
“There was a time when this region, including Ballston Spa, which had its own, its own mineral waters, such as Sans Souci, was creating and sending out over a million bottles of mineral water a year. And that's part of the reason why this museum is here, because that's our regional history,” said Leonard.
The museum’s collection comes almost entirely from donations. Hand-pumped seltzer bottles, small medicinal vials, and massive glass carboys that were early work-arounds on tariffs on individual bottles are scattered throughout.
One cabinet features a bottle from every state, including Georgia’s submission of an early Coca-Cola bottle that was hand-picked by President Jimmy Carter.
“And then, if you think about glass overall, just think about everything that comes in plastic. Now, your mayonnaise, your mouth wash, your shampoo, your milk, all of that, at one point was sold in glass. And there's an artistry to these kind of glass bottles, because the colors that are chosen, the embossing, the advert. It's all advertising for your particular product,” said Leonard.
The most eye-catching part of the museum is the floor-to-ceiling display of more than 3,000 bottles from around the world.
They come in all different sizes and range in color. Depending on what’s added during production, a bottle could turn out blue, like the signature Saratoga Water bottles, which have cobalt or copper. Iron and selenium make yellow, magnesium makes purple, carbon and nickel make brown.
One of Leonard’s favorite bottles is clear.
“A 1981 Soviet era Pepsi Cola bottle. And it's, you know, it's got the Cyrillic Russian lettering, but as far as I understand, it's still pronounced Pepsi in Russia. But I love this particular bottle just because I envision one-time Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, with his big mustache, you know, sipping a bottle of that and staring at it angrily. For some reason I see him staring at it angrily. But it—there's a there's an interesting history to that,” said Leonard.
Leonard says one of the special parts about having the National Bottle Museum in this region is that visitors arrive regularly with glass fragments or whole bottles they dug out of their yard and leave with a new appreciation for how it wound up there.
“Bottles immediately connect to people. It's not such an ancient technology that we don't have glass bottles around. We still drink out and beer out of them, and some sodas and things like that, and some medications still come in them. So, it's an art form. It's a piece of history that people can attach themselves to and have a history with but at the same point as it stretches out back in time, when there's that greater artistry, that glass blowing history, we've moved so far past that that it's really nice to be able to help people interact with it,” said Leonard.
While the museum is always accepting donations, Leonard says it's easy to start your own collection:
"A little bit of baking soda and water is a good one. Just a little bit of dishwashing liquid and things like that. Clean out the inside. Lights, light scrubbing brushes with nylon, not metal, bristles. And do you have a nice souvenir," said Leonard.