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History in a Jar
By JOYCE M. TICE
In 1795, Napoleon offered a 12,000-franc prize for a method to preserve food for the military. Chef Nicholas Appert, whose background included both pickling and brewing, won by developing a method of heating food in glass containers and sealing them with pitch. In 1810, an Englishman named Peter Durance invented a method to use metal containers to preserve food. In both cases, the processes were developed for a military advantage.
Food canning works by creating enough heat to kill all organisms and enzymes that could spoil food and sealing out any new ones from entering. The earliest home canning involved a glass jar with a tin lid and sealing wax. The parts were not reusable because the sealing wax acted a bit like cement. Even so, it was a step forward from earlier preserving methods of drying, pickling, salting, and smoking, and it offered a way to preserve a greater variety of the summer’s harvest.
In 1858, tinsmith John L. Mason developed a way to cut threads into a metal lid. Mason paired the threaded lid and a gasket with a matching threaded and reusable glass jar. Home canning became a new sensation. This Mason jar design was in use for decades. You will still commonly find them in antique stores. If you see 1858 on the Mason jar, that is the patent date and not the date of the jar’s manufacture.
The Lightning jar was invented in 1882. This is the familiar jar with a glass top and container and a wire clamp to hold the top on. The jar rubber was the sealing element. This was a common model until the 1960s, and some are still in use.
In 1915 Alexander H. Kerr, whose company was founded in 1903, developed the glass jar with a flat metal lid and gasket held in place until sealed with a threaded metal ring. This model is still in almost universal use today.
The Ball brothers were container manufacturers who switched to glass jars in 1883. This is the name that dominates the home-canning industry to the present day. Ball had bought out many smaller producers over the decades. The Ball Corporation no longer makes canning products. Kerr, Golden Harvest, Bernardin, and Ball brands are presently all manufactured by Alltrista Corporation.
Before company consolidations reduced the variety of canning-jar brands, hundreds of smaller companies made their own versions of the canning-jar types mentioned above. Older jars come in all sizes, shapes, colors, and prices. I recently managed to dig out a couple of Drey brand jars from several boxes of used, mixed contemporary jars and purchased them for a quarter each. They often are offered for $10 to $15 each if sorted by dealers first.
Canadian brands often have a crown on them, and there are several of these brands. There are square ones, amethyst or amber ones, and red ones—for budgets much larger than mine will ever be. Even as recently as 2002-2004, Ball brand put out some lovely jelly jars in a collector’s series. These are no longer available and already go for very inflated prices on eBay or specialty stores that kept them in stock.
If you keep your eyes open and get lucky you can build an interesting collection of canning jars for modest prices. Or, if you have money to spare, you can spend as much as $2,000 on rare ones that I have seen listed in the price book. The diversity you find will surprise you.
Joyce M. Tice is the creator of the Tri-Counties Genealogy and History http://www.rootsweb.com/~srgp/jmtindex.htm. You can contact her at lookingback@mountainhomemag.com.
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