Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 7, 1992 TAG: 9202070250
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
EMPTY JUG IS FULL OF HISTORY
Bill Rutherford's three-gallon whiskey jug was full 100 years ago - before some people started bad-mouthing Christopher Columbus."The trouble is it doesn't have anything in it" now, Rutherford said recently.
He bought the big jug for a few dollars in Cambria 40 years ago.
Rutherford said that he thinks somebody must have had a pretty good party in or about 1893, when the whiskey in the jug won a prize at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
When this party was beginning, it must have taken a sturdy person to pour.
The jug is a heavy earthen affair, and Rutherford figures that with the good stuff in it, it must have weighed 30 pounds.
The label on the jug that once held sour-mash Old Times whiskey says the stuff was bottled in Louisville, Ky., to honor the 400th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to America. That was 1892.
Rutherford, 72, is a retired General Electric sales representative who lives in Southwest Roanoke and collects bottles and other things.
Rutherford said he remembers memorizing the famous Columbus verse in school: "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."
"Now, he's not the way that we used to study about," Rutherford said.
But he said it still was interesting - in the year the 500th anniversary of Columbus' journey will be celebrated - to consider a three-gallon whiskey jug that helped do a similar thing a century ago.
And Rutherford said he isn't willing to argue about the part of the New World that Columbus actually discovered - although it used to be taught that he landed on this country's Atlantic coast.
"That's the way it was taught to me, but it really doesn't matter to me," Rutherford said.
Rutherford, a gray-haired, slim and agile native of West Virginia, said the jug reminded him of more recent history.
He said farmers in his youth used to load their wagons with fruit-tree spray in similar jugs and insert look-alike containers filled with whiskey.
That way, he said, "their wives wouldn't know what they had" when they brought the whiskey home.
He said he didn't know of a single instance of someone drinking the fruit spray instead of the liquor.
Rutherford returned to his jug, portions of its tattered cork still intact.
Maybe, he said, he'd fill it up with lemonade - which wouldn't really be the same.
"The trouble is," Rutherford said again, "it's all gone."