Treasure hunt: Rare Coca

This elusive slug plate bottle has a questionable top. The Danville printing is just below the center of the bottle.

This collection of bottles was once used by the Coca-Cola bottling company in Danville. The one on the far left as the Danville "slug."

Have you ever heard of a slug plate?

Most people are staring at that sentence, trying to figure out what it means.

Would that be a fancy piece of china, decorated with slugs? Or maybe a plate on which slugs are served? This has nothing to do with the slimy creatures.

Instead, this is a story about Danville's history with Coca-Cola and one elusive item, something that might even be sitting away in your attic.

But first, let's talk about bottles. Before Coca-Cola switched to plastic bottles in the 1970s, you would find glass bottles in vending machines and refrigerators at the store. The earliest of those bottles were called slug plates. Why? A slug plate bottle is created from a mold that has a removable plate located at what will be the center of the face.

This plate contained all the pertinent information about the bottler and contents. It allowed the bottle maker to have a generic mold that could be used to make bottles for multiple customers just by switching out the plate. Mechanization would soon make this process obsolete, so only the earliest Coca-Cola bottles were manufactured this way.

And this is where the River City comes in. Danville's Coca-Cola bottling plant opened in 1905. It stayed in the city until the company relocated it to Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2018. Being one of the early bottling plants, that meant Danville had a slug plate of its own, a specific bottle identifying where it was made.

The only problem? They’re extremely hard to find. In fact, local collectors only became aware of the first Danville bottle in 2007, after someone put it up on eBay. Before that, it was almost an urban myth of sorts. Because of the time period, people believed it existed, but up until 2007, nobody had actually seen one, at least not in public.

As any collector knows, sometimes one must be willing to accept certain flaws when acquiring that elusive piece. And this bottle was flawed. The entire neck had been broken off and rather crudely glued back on. But here it was, proof of Danville's connection to Coca-Cola's early history.

And when we say early history, that's accurate. Dr. John Pemberton sold the first glass of Coca-Cola on May 8, 1886, in Atlanta. Mass bottling wouldn't start until the mid-1890s and worked its way north, with a plant going up in Danville almost a decade later.

Now here's where the search comes in. Some of these early plate bottles are a dime a dozen. Collectors put them on display and you can even find some at flea markets. But Danville's version remains hard to find.

Remember the one found in 2007? It took another 15 years to find a second one. This is why it might be worth a trip into your attic or through old storage boxes. The Danville slug plate bottle is extremely rare, which isn't too surprising. When some people find these older bottles, they send the pieces to the recycling bin.

To be clear, we’re not saying it took 15 years to find a perfect version. We’re saying it took until 2022 to locate a second Danville slug plate of any kind, even a damaged one. This has been a project for Danville Historical Society President Gus Dyer, one he's pursued for quite a while. And earlier this year, it paid off.

He found one with no cracks or major chips. There was just one issue. It didn't have the right top. It should have had the familiar crown top. That's the type of bottle top with a lip that held a metal cap, resembling a crown. Instead, it had a blob top.

Upon close inspection, it became clear someone grinded the top lip off this bottle. Perhaps it had been done to deceive, perhaps merely to eliminate a badly chipped lip.

Chipped and broken lips are quite common problems for these types of bottles. If a bottle opener wasn't handy, often the thirsty consumer would "improvise" by prying off the cap with a pocketknife or the edge of the table, sometimes resulting in a damaged lip. There are now even bottle "hospitals" that can repair this type of damage. Repair isn't cheap, however. Even minor fixes run from $165 to $185.

Now if you really want to go on a hunt, there's one version even harder to find than the Danville bottle. It's called a "Hutchinson" bottle. These were the very first bottles for Coca-Cola, the ones used from the mid-1890s to the turn of the century. Even back in the early 20th century, these would have been hard to find, as there were only a dozen varieties, sold in a few places in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee.

How do you know if a bottle is a Hutchinson? The name comes from the metal stopper used to seal them. They used a wire contraption to hold the stopper in place, and they only had a simple blob top. To open the bottle, a person punched down on a metal loop in the stopper, which broke the seal and made a popping sound.

After 1900, those stoppers were replaced by bottle caps or crowns.

So if you’ve got time during the weekend or the next time you’re cleaning house, just keep an eye out for an old Coke bottle. If it says Danville on the front, you could have a rare find.

You can email the Danville Historical Society at [email protected]. For more information on their tours or any of their artifacts, visit their website at danvillehistory.org.

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