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The Single-Year Bottlers
A total of eight El Paso bottlers were only listed in the city directories for a single year. A rash of small bottlers appeared during and just prior to the Prohibition era (1918-1932) to take advantage of the cessation of the sales of alcoholic beverages. Such entrepreneurs likely thought that the thirsty public would turn to softer drinks to assuage their cravings. In general, they were wrong--as demonstrated by the number of small bottlers who joined the ranks of the city's carbonated beverage manufacturers and then vanished into anonymity. With the notable exception of G. Edwin Angerstein, little is known about these short-lived operators who rarely advertised and left us little record. As with the other small bottlers, these left little trace of their passing in either the archaeological record or the historical one. There may even have been others who never enumerated their existence in the pages of the directories, and some who did may have lasted longer than their single recorded year. Angerstein, for example, was never listed in the city directories and was only discovered by chance through his seven months of advertising in El Paso newspapers. |
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Chapter 13a Coffin & Co. and its Bottles |