19th-Century Hoopla Over Miss Liberty

With all of the hoopla about the Statue of Liberty celebration, San Francisco collector Ada Fitzsimmons recalled that there was just as much hype, if not more, before the Frederic Auguste Bartholdi colossus was hauled into place in New York Harbor a century ago.

In 1884, it seems that the committee to underwrite the project was short of cash for the statue’s pedestal--it needed $250,000--when it received an audacious offer from an Eastern-based firm, the Centaur Co., which produced a widely used laxative-type of medicine, Fletcher’s Castoria.

In exchange for a $25,000 contribution, the company proposed that the word “Castoria” be emblazoned in 50-foot-high letters across the top of Miss Liberty’s pedestal for one year.

“Thus, art and science, the symbol of liberty to man and of health to his children, would be more closely enshrined in the hearts of our people,” wrote officials of the firm in a letter dated March 25, 1884, to William Evarts, chairman of the statue’s pedestal committee.

Needless to say, the proposal was firmly rejected. Otherwise, Castoria would have had a more prominent place in history than simply the popular tonic that it once was.

Still, said collector Fitzsimmons, who runs the Paper Pile and edits a collectible quarterly based in the San Francisco Bay Area (P.O. Box 337, San Anselmo, Calif. 94960), there were plenty of cash-raising promotions and collectibles being marketed, officially and unofficially, by the time of the statue’s inauguration.

“There were a lot of cheap souvenirs on the market then,” Fitzsimmons said in a telephone interview. For example, she said, the Statue of Liberty committee of that time had two miniature statues on the market to collect money for the massive project. One, six inches in height, sold for about $1 and may now be worth as much as $50, she said.

But the second one was far more valuable. That one, Fitzsimmons said, was a foot-high bronze statue with a cheap alloy base that, at the time, sold for $5. Today, she said, it could have a value well in excess of $300.

What will today’s Statue of Liberty centennial collectibles be worth in a few years? Not a great deal, Fitzsimmons believes. “They’re making too darn many of them,” she said.

Question: How difficult is it to evaluate milk bottles? I have several in my collection going back a number of years but have had trouble nailing down precise prices. It seems every region of the country has a different idea of what my collection is worth.--S.G.

Answer: Like many other collectible areas, there is no one marketplace for your collection. Prices may vary dramatically from one part of the country to another.

Several factors will influence price: condition, who is buying (a collector as opposed to a dealer, who probably won’t pay as much) and scarcity.

Milk-bottle collecting is popular and collectors attempt to go back as far as possible in locating rare examples. Milk bottles were first produced in the 1880s in New York and New Jersey.

One method of researching these early bottles is to delve into patent records.

Following the year 1900 and up to the early 1950s, tons of milk bottles were produced in all shapes and sizes from quarter pints to gallon containers.

Collectors’ prices have generally ranged beneath $100. But a rare bottle changing hands for several hundred dollars won’t cause serious collectors to blink.