Jeff Haimowitz still remembers the day he discovered his first buried treasure; or was it trash? It depends on who you ask.
He found it while helping demolish an old home; under the rubble lay items long since buried and forgotten by their past owners. Buried alongside dirt and vintage grocery store flyers sat his prize: an antique glass ink bottle. To many, this may have been a momentarily interesting event, or even ignored entirely, but to Haimowitz, it led him to a lifelong passion for bottle digging and collecting.
As a former Jacksonville social studies and mathematics teacher, Haimowitz believes old bottles aren’t just junk; they are valuable pieces of local history to be learned from. In a way, bottle collecting is the study of people through what they left behind…