The date when glass was
invented is unknown. One story theorizes that ancient Phoenician merchants
built a campfire on a beach and afterward found glass in the ashes. Further
research shows glass found at early Egyptian and Roman sites dating back 2,150
years.
Today, it is hard to imagine
121 years ago, when glass was nearly impossible to obtain in a remote area.
Bill Russell, Clarendon, Texas, found evidence of that in an oral
interview conducted in 1936.
Lou Naylor and family, who
came to the area in 1891, lived in a dugout 12 miles east of newly founded
Clarendon. The wild plum and grape crop was excellent that summer, so the
Naylors decided to make jelly. Sugar could be bought that summer in Clarendon,
but not fruit jars.
Undaunted, the men were sent
to gather empty whiskey and wine bottles. The bottles were filled with cold
water up to the base of the neck. Heavy twine was soaked in coal oil and tied
around the bottle at the water line. The twine was set afire, and when it
dropped off the bottle was tapped against the table where, hopefully, the neck
broke off.
Next, the jar’s sharp edges
were ground smooth on a flat stone. The new glasses were cleaned and filled
with jelly. Brown wrapping paper was cut into circles, dipped into hot vinegar
water and hung to dry. Later, the circles were laid atop the glasses, folded
over the rim and tied in place with string. The vinegar odor seemed to keep
insects away while the jars were in storage in the root cellar.
The Trew family owned a
cellar full of fruit jars and a National pressure cooker made in Eau Claire, Wis. Mother
had it tested each year at the Home Demonstration agent’s office in Perryton, Texas,
and it still sits in storage in our well house. It held quart jars or two
layers of pint fruit jars. I can remember carrying bushel baskets of jars from
the cellar to the kitchen when Mother started her summer canning.
We had neighbors who bought
bottles and a bottle-capping tool that attached tin caps to the lips of
bottles. Apple cider, root beer and fruit juice could be bottled and kept in
storage. But the favorite use of the bottle system was for making home-brew.
There were many different recipes and an equally limitless number of end
results for this beer-type concoction.
My favorite home-brew story,
told by a friend, involved several cases of home-brew bottled up and stored in
a closet just off the living room of his home. The new minister and his wife
came calling, and while they were visiting in the living room, the bottles
began popping their lids. The unique odor and foam creeping out from under the
closet door left little doubt what, exactly, was behind the closed door.
The story was too good to
keep secret. After it made its rounds in the community, my friend’s dad was
nicknamed “Popping Johnny.” FC
Delbert Trew is a
freelance writer, retired rancher and supervisor of the Devil’s Rope Museum in
McLean, Texas.
Contact him at Trew Ranch, Box A, Alanreed,
TX 79002;
(806) 779-3164; email: trewblue@centramedia.net.