The Morrison County Historical Society has been in existence since 1936. We’ve been collecting for seventy-one years. I’ve only been with the Society for eleven years and while you might think that would be enough time to get to know everything in our collections, it isn’t.
I was researching the Little Falls Bottling Works for an article in the latest issue of our newsletter when I made an unexpected find. I was looking for bottles from the Bottling Works in our collections to illustrate my story when I found two with something rather strange inside. My first thought was please don’t let these be body parts. Upon closer examination I breathed a sigh of relief. They were old pickles. But however did they get them inside the bottles? The necks were far too small for the pickles to fit through, either going in or coming out. Our Executive Director, Jan Warner, had the answer. She said that people used to put bottles into their gardens and the cucumber sprout was placed inside the bottle, where it grew to be a bigger cucumber. Why this was the thing to do is another question altogether. There’s no way to get the pickle out without breaking the bottle, and that won’t do because the pickle might get shards of glass in it. Yum!
