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 The "by BARNEY and ALLY" bottle is one of the six rarest and most coveted bottles in any Mountain Dew bottler's collection. Not only is it one of the most significant bottles in Mountain Dew's history, it is also extremely rare, with less than 40 believed to be in existence today. In 1992 only 6 of these bottles had been reported but that same year a farmer in middle Tennessee found a full case (24) of empties in his barn and sold them to a dealer in Nashville. The "by BARNEY and ALLY" bottle was the very first Applied Color Label (ACL) Mountain Dew bottle ever produced, but curiously, it was the second ACL bottle to go into production. Because this bottle bears the names of the fathers of Mountain Dew it is a must for the serious Mountain Dew collector. Barney and Ally Hartman ran a bottling plant in Knoxville, Tennessee during the 40's. During this time the brothers were using a hard liquor mixer that they had concocted for their personal use and to use for a mixer during parties. Among their friends the mixer was jokingly called Mountain Dew. In 1946, to further the joke of this "Home Brewed Concoction", Barney had a young high school student draw up a paper label. The label showed a hillbilly with a gun and on the label they wrote "Home Brewed by BARNEY and OLLIE" (the High School student had misspelled Ally) .... The mixer was so popular at parties that during the next two years friends convinced the Hartman brothers to take this home brewed mixer commercial and they applied for a patent in 1948. The patent was awarded to the Hartman's on both the name "Mountain Dew" and also awarded on the now famous design in 1953. In anticipation of going into production the "by BARNEY and ALLY" bottle, pictured above, was ordered in 1951 (and another run in 1952) but the bottles were stored in a warehouse in Knoxville until 1955. Interestingly, in 1954 Tri-City Beverage in Johnson City, Tennessee beat Hartman Beverage into production by putting out the first commercially available Mountain Dew bottle "by CHARLIE, JIM and BILL" ..... Many people are unaware that all of these early Mountain Dew bottles contained a flavor similar to "7-Up" not the lemon-lime flavor we enjoy today. (By Dick Bridgforth) |
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