Kansas Glass
I have a thing about glass especially colored glass bottles. Some of this might come from my father & grandfather, Clarence and Sam McGhee, who worked in the Tyro Glass Plant in the early 1900s.
But my memories of colored glass bottles began in the early days in the oilfields in northern Greenwood County. Most of the bottles we had were saved from our own usage or were found at the camp’s trash dump in a nearby gully. My mother would pick wild flowers for bouquets to put in the dinky rooms of the shot-gun house we lived in. This was at the Phillip Petroleum Company’s oilfield camp on the Greene lease below the well-known Teter Hill.
Mother had a tall brown bottle that she used for sunflowers, daisies and cattails. Mother and I collected all kinds of dried weeds that looked great in this type of vase. I think it was possibly a beer bottle but to Mother it was just a unique brown bottle.
Mother had several blue colored bottles of different shapes and sizes. A small blue perfume bottle was used for wild rose buds or the tiny, pale lavender sheep-shower blooms. The taller blue, flat bottles were so pretty filled with wild asters. Some of the blue colored ones had contained Milk-of-Magsium at one time. The Vicks VapoRub came in a squat, blue jar with a wide mouth. I loved to floats blossoms in them. My parents grew hollyhocks and just one blossom would spread out across the top, completely covering the bottle except the shiny blue bottom.
For larger bouquets Mother would get out one of her green canning jars that currently are so coveted by antique dealers. The opening in this type of container was much larger than most bottles. The long woody stems of the wild gooseberry with tiny yellow blossoms were spectacular in this tall green jar. When we set this bouquet on the library table in front of the south window, the Kansas sun shone through the glass adding sparkle to the arrangement.