Bar Full of Fancy Figurines : Bottles Treasured More Than the Liquor in Them

Visitors to Jerry’s Farm House restaurant sometimes get the spooky feeling that they are being watched.

With good reason. In every nook and cranny of the rural bar and restaurant are miniature figures with such familiar faces as John Wayne, Abe Lincoln and Elvis Presley. Two replica long guns adorn the old-fashioned bar, and a model of the Spirit of St. Louis floats from a beam.

The 907 figurines collected over the past decade are not just ordinary souvenir bric-a-brac. Each one is filled with 80-proof booze.

“I don’t know of any place around that has a collection of whiskey gift bottles like this,” said Agnes Bunce, who with her husband, Jerry, moved from Hamilton, Ohio, to this small Northern California town 13 years ago. “We bought them all from distributors by standing right behind the bar.”

Enshrined safely in a clear plastic case are some of the couple’s rarer buys, including a 14-piece “famous miners” set worth $8,000. There are 10 Elvis Presley figures in different poses that cost up to $200 each and a “classic car room” with replicas of everything from a Model T Ford to a vintage fire engine.

“There are ceramic guns with a fifth of booze in them. It’s silly,” Bunce said. His restaurant, a wood-framed structure built in 1875, sits 40 miles north of San Francisco adjacent to the entrance of Point Reyes National Seashore, a sprawling area visited by a million people each year.

Agnes Bunce said she attracts a lot of repeat business by serving old-fashioned biscuits made from her grandmother’s recipe, along with homemade strawberry jam, apple pie and salad dressings. The biscuits are so popular, she said, that they prepare the mix in a 30-gallon drum.

“We have to make the mix several times a month,” she said. “People like coming here because we’re just ordinary country folks who serve down-home meals at reasonable prices.

“And, we’ve had a lot of visitors come in to see our bottle collection,” the very first of which is still her favorite--a vase-shaped Jim Beam bottle embroidered with a yellow rose.

Other ceramic and crystal figures include an intricate fishing boat, a sewing machine, a fox terrier and a skater under the Olympic flame. They are all wired firmly on shelves to prevent their tumbling in an earthquake like the great 1906 shaker, which was centered only half a mile away.

Jerry Bunce does the bookkeeping for the family business that includes two sons, a daughter and a daughter-in-law. He said the odd-shaped bottles hold up to a fifth of liquor apiece and have to be bought directly from distributors because interstate shipping of liquor by mail is illegal.

“A lot of people collect empty bottles through catalogues,” Bunce said. “Ours are all full.”

He said over the years they’ve bought bottles from such well-known distilleries as Wild Turkey, which sold them three colorful turkey figures, to more obscure labels like Lionstone Whiskey, which produced a man in a tub.

“There’s a lot of whiskeys I never heard of until we started collecting the bottles,” Bunce said.