Bottles on the Border: The History and Bottles of the Soft Drink ...

Munsy (2002:15) provides more information on the horse and dates Pretty Polly’s career to the
early 1900s.
Figure 5-31 – Closeup of the Pretty
Polly bar ads
Figure 5-30 – Unknown El Paso bar with bar ads for Apollinaris
Water [left], Lemp Beer, and the White Rock fairy [both right]
(James A. Ward collection)
Sales in 1896 reached 16 million bottles. By 1980, the company
had sold 335 million bottles of Apollinaris products during the preceding
year (Anonymous [1993]:111). The company adopted the now familiar
logo with the word Apollinaris superimposed over a red triangle by 1894,
along with the slogan “Queen of Table Waters” (Munsey 2002:13-14).
Munsey also suggested that glass bottles may have been in use as early as
1888. Some of the earliest bottles, possibly prior to that date, were almost
certainly only used in Germany (Figure 5-32).
By the time Houck & Dieter began advertising Apollinaris Water,
the product would have been bottled in glass bottles with blob tops for
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wiring down corks (Figure 5-33). Wilson (1981:38) illustrated and
Figure 5-32 – German
Apollinaris bottle
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Apollinaris bottles were so popular that Anheuser Busch adopted them as the first beer
bottle in 1872. Although Anheuser-Busch switched to the almost instantly popular export beer
bottle soon thereafter, the brewery continued using Apollinaris bottles until they wore out. Some
of these returnable bottles were reused by either Anheuser-Busch or local breweries until at least
the 1890s (Lockhart 2007:50-52).
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