Variants: BOLEY & Co Gold Rush Era Soda Bottle

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Variants of the Boley & Co. Gold Rush Era Soda Bottle

All Boley & Co. Sac City Cal bottles have graphite pontiled bases and color shades of blue to dark cobalt. 

There are a few examples that have open pontiled bases.

Of all Gold Rush soda bottles the Boley & Co. examples probably have more potential variants due to front and back embossing patterns.

Front Embossing

1) The embossing on the front is either larger or smaller letters (font).  Larger font embossing has the two lines closer together. Small font embossing has the two lines further apart. This is easy to see.

2) All embossing on the front of the bottle comes in a slug plate. All embossing on all variants comes in two lines and all in Capitol lettering.  The first line reads “Boley & Co.” with the O in company small font and raised. The second line reads “Sac City Cal” with the C in Sac either a capitol letter or in small font and a raised letter. The L in Cal is always small font and raised.

3) There will be many variants of Boley’s. You will have the “large, straight C” and you will have the “small font raised C” in the word Sac. 

4) The two key variants is to look closely at the letter “Y” in Boley in the first line and at the letter “Y” in City in the second line. You will variants where the “Y” in Boley is to the LEFT of the “Y” in city. You will also see the variant where the “Y” in Boley is to the RIGHT of the “Y” in city. These are the 2 “Y” variants.

Back Embossing Variants (3)

1)    BLANK   A slug plate with no embossing

2)   UNION GLASS WORKS  First line arched regular capitol font

 PHILAD.  A  Second line Philad. Is regular capitol font. Second line the A is small font and raised

3)  SAME AS ABOVE (2)  First line is the same as variant 2

 Second line is the same as variant 2 except in seraph font

With such embossing possibilities, the Boley & Co. Sac City Cal bottles remain hard to tell just how many variants of this bottle might be out there. When you factor in such things on the front like large or small letters, floating or straight C’s, the Boley Y and the City Y you have many possibilities here. Throw in the 3 different type of backs that this bottle comes in it is easy to see that there could be a couple dozen possibilities.

A way to look at variants might be to take the small letter bottle and investigate any front and back differences.

Then look at the large letter bottle and do the same. It may be found that some variants may be associated only with one or the other font sized bottles. 

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