Bottles from 100 years ago on display at the Woods Hole Historical Museum that were collected by Becky Lash, who will tell about them October 11. (Photo by Robert Grosch)
The Woods Hole Historical Museum will mark Massachusetts Archaeology Month with a talk by Woods Hole resident Rebecca Lash about collecting antique bottles, in the large meeting room in the lower level of the Woods Hole Public Library.
“The gist of the talk will be about what people did with their refuse 100 or more years ago, and what we can learn about Woods Holers of the late 1800s and first half of the 1900s,” Ms. Lash said.
“My hope is that representatives of our parents’ generation will have memories and stories from their younger days about some of the things I’ve found: bottles, clay pipes, porcelain doll parts, insulators, wall tubes, and everyday things.”
Ms. Lash became interested in collecting antique bottles and items about 25 years ago when she was a teacher at North Falmouth Elementary School. She brought her class to Woods Hole Historical Museum and Falmouth Museums on the Green when students were doing a unit about colonial America. “I thought it would be neat to be archaeologists and find cool stuff that would teach us things about the early days of Falmouth. The day of our Woods Hole field trip we used the Woods Hole School as our home base and we pretended we were in school way back in the 1800s. It was low tide and we found some bottles near Eel Pond.”
A display of some of Ms. Lash’s bottles is on exhibit at the museum at 579 Woods Hole Road. A chart adjacent to the display details all their dates, purposes, and manufacturing sites. Ms. Lash will help the audience learn how to identify and date bottles that they find.
The talk is free and open to the public. The library, which is at 581 Woods Hole Road, is handicap-accessible.