Warner’s Safe Cure: The Early Bottles

When Warner first began producing his Remedies, his available products were limited to his Safe Kidney & Liver Cure, Safe Pills, Safe Bitters and Safe Diabetes Cure. He picked up where Craig left off in more than one way. Not only did he purchase the right to produce Craig’s Cure, he adopted the amber bottle that had packaged his cures. Although the embossed Safe would become one of his trade marks (See Beware of Fraud!), one of his earliest bottles had no Safe embossed on it. Rather, Warner’s Safe Cure was embossed around the shoulders of the bottle. This shoulder embossed Warner’s Safe Cure (WRG 7) was thought by Seeliger to be the first Warner bottle used; however, based on the existence of a labelled version of the bottle owned by Jack Stecher, he and Ojea suggested the bottle may have been used as late as 1883 as a transition bottle before Warner released his 3 Cities bottles (Rochester, Toronto and London). This idea was based on the fact that the label listed not only the Rochester office, but also the Toronto (1882) and London (1883) offices. The shoulder embossed Safe Cure used to be a fairly common Warner’s bottle; however, as they have been taken off the market include personal collections, these bottles have become increasingly difficult to obtain and WRG now classifies them as “Scarce.”

The early Warner bottles are also characterized by the so-called “double collar”  or sometimes the “medicine collar,” both of which were later replaced by the blob collar, and by a full slug plate on the face of the bottle. If you look on the base of these early bottles, you will frequently, although not always, see the mark of the bottle maker “A&DHC”. This mark represents the product of Alexander & David H. Chambers or the Chambers Works of Pittsburgh (1843-1889). These early Warner’s bottles with the double or medicine collar, full slug plate and A&DHC mark are much more difficult to obtain by collectors and are rated as Scare to Rare by WRG.