Historic Hood River

Notes

Grace selected this cobalt blue bottle for today’s museum artifact:

This striking triangular cobalt blue poison bottle comes from The Owl Drug Company, which was a subsidiary of Rexall Drugs. The Owl Drug Company began in San Francisco in 1892. In 1903, in collaboration with the Whitall Tatum Glass Company, they began making triangular-shaped cobalt blue bottles to store various poisons in, which would become an iconic symbol of the company. The side of the bottle with an owl on it in our collection strongly resembles the company logo as it was in 1917 but proved difficult to photograph. Kresse Drug Co., also “the friendly neighborhood Rexall store,” as per this advertisement, was located in the Brosius Building on Oak Street from the early 1900s through the 1990s. This bottle was likely purchased from the Oak Street store sometime after the 1917 logo change, possibly between the 1920s and 1940s.

You can read about cobalt blue glass here.  Of course all of this begs the question:  what was the poison that was stored in this bottle?  Was it being used for some medicinal purpose?

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