Construction crew in West Nyack dig up an "amazing find," a 100-year-old pharmacy bottle, still full
A bottle from a pharmacy in Nyack over 100 years ago was found during road work, with its original contents still inside.
It's an amazing historical find that was discovered by construction workers nine feet underground in West Nyack.
Clarkstown Supervisor George Hoehmann says the name on the bottle is C.R. Christy, a pharmacy that dates back to the early 1900s on Broadway Street.
The cork, cotton wick, and chemicals inside the bottle are still intact.
Bottle is an "amazing find" for history
"Just to think that a bottle like this is found nine feet under a road, I mean, how many millions of vehicles actually drove this road in the last hundred years?" Hoehmann said.
"It's just an amazing find, I mean this is something that we can talk about history, and we can back it up with the newspaper articles, but it's so cool to have an artifact that you can see and even touch," said history expert from the New City Library Joe Barbieri.
Barbieri says that he discovered that Christy ran ads in the local paper 125 years ago about his sarsaparilla and white pine syrups, which can help "purify the blood" and "regulate the liver."
But he didn't just sell elixirs and medicine. Barbieri explained that Christy also provided "an important service in the town. He got telephone service in the 1890s, so that would have been probably a big deal."
What is inside the bottle?
However, what exactly is inside the bottle remains a mystery, as does what it was used to treat.
"It kind of matches the description of one of his elixirs," Hoehmann.
The town is considering having its contents tested.
