By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Dave Waddell
From our April 2025 Home & Garden issue
According to Dave Copp, May 10, 1968 was “the best day I ever had in my life.” He was 12 years old, and a bottle collector from Union named Bob Heath had hired him and a friend to dig in cellar holes for buried treasure: handblown bottles in ruby, topaz, emerald, and sapphire shades. “He gave us lunch and all the soda we could drink,” says Copp, who came from a poor Rockland family, and by the time he’d unearthed a small mound of vessels, he was hooked. He told Heath, “I like what I’m digging up. So here’s the start of my pile, and here’s the remainder for you over here.” To Copp’s surprise, Heath accepted his proposal and, for the next 15 years, Copp worked as his protégé before striking out on his own.
Today, Copp has approximately 7,000 old bottles and other glass vessels plucked from cellar holes, ravines, and other spots where people used to toss trash, as well as specimens he’s purchased, in a weathered garage next to his Friendship home. Loosely arranged by color, shape, and style on cluttered tables and backlit on window shelves are cuboid containers embossed with the names of miracle cures and hair tonics; vintage Pepsi bottles with mint-condition labels; bulbous vintage carboys and cider jugs; black glass; milk glass; frosted glass; and more. Most items are priced between $18 and $25, but a few, like an 1880s, dark-amber Dr. Fenner’s Kidney and Back Ache Cure bottle, are valued at $110 and up.
Over the last seven years, Copp has sold off more than half of what had been a roughly 18,000-bottle collection to make room for another passion: lobster buoys. He’s been collecting them since he was a kid, but they’d taken a back seat to bottles. Last year, Copp changed the name of his shop from Dave’s Bottles to Dave’s Bottle and Buoy Heaven (358 Cushing Rd., Friendship. Open most days between late April and early November). About two dozen striped buoys, priced around $10 apiece, now dangle from the garage’s rafters, their spindles low enough to graze shoppers’ heads. Dozens more decorate the building’s exterior and clotheslines strung between the shop and Copp’s home.
Still, bottles remain Copp’s most ardent obsession. On the day of our visit, he ambled around the shop with a can of cherry-flavored Pepsi. “These bottles are like frigging jewels,” he said, picking up a liter-size amethyst vessel embossed with the words “GILLESPIE’S SCALP INVIGORATOR BOSTON MASS.” It had a thick pontil mark bubbling inward at the base, rounded shoulders, and a flared lip that Copp said dates it to around 1850. The glass was pocked with air bubbles that suggest it was handblown in cold weather. He holds it up to the light, cooing appreciatively like Heath used to do when Copp excavated a gem from the dirt decades ago. “You see, Bob knew I had to have an escape,” he said. “Something to enjoy that nobody could take away from me. And old bottles, they’re really frickin’ cool — the clarity, scarcity, texture, all the colors of the rainbow. What’s not to like?”
Read more stories about Maine collectors and their treasures, off-grid Maine homes, and more in our Home & Garden issue.
