raw · notes · ingested 2026-07-26
Sweep of Lockhart's complete El Paso corpus for Three Rivers marks — negative-result inventory
Source: MANUAL — systematic text sweep of secure-sha.org/bottleinfo.historicbottles.com PDF series, 2026-07-26
Method: downloaded every hosted PDF in both series, extracted text with pdftotext, and searched case-insensitively for “three rivers”, “3 rivers”, “3RIVERS”, and “3-RIVERS”. Performed 2026-07-26.
Corpus covered
Bottles on the Border (23 files): EPChap1-4, 5a, 5b, 5c, 5d, 6a, 7a, 7b, 7c, 8a, 8b, 8c, 9a, 9b, 10a, 10b, 10c, 11a, 11b, 11c, 12a, 12b, 12c. Chapter 13+ is not hosted (probes 404 on both mirrors).
El Paso Dairies (20 files): Foreword; Chapters 1 (Overview), 2 (Terminology), 3 (Dating Bottles), 4 (Dating Cartons), 5 (Finishes, two parts), 6 (Early Dairies), 7 (Hawkins Dairy), 8 (Prices Dairy), 9 (Good Service Dairies), 10 (Small Dairies Early), 12 (End of Glass); Appendices intro plus A–F. (Chapter 11 was already ingested separately.)
Result
Zero new Three Rivers customers. Hits occur only in:
- Border chapters 5c (Empire), 9a (Union), 9b (Nicholson), 12b (Victory, Lone Star BW) — all previously ingested;
- Dairies Chapter 11 (Mistletoe, Dairy League) — previously ingested;
- Dairies Appendix F, which adds only the full specimen record of the known Mistletoe half-pint:
Body: Embossed Mistletoe (highly stylized, thick embossing…) Heel: Embossed - 3 RIVERS [star] 28 Back … Heel: Embossed - 5 Manufacturer: Three Rivers Glass Co. (1922-1937) (Smith 1989:vii) Dating: [1928] Mistletoe may have used the same style of bottles throughout the nine years of its existence in El Paso.
Interpretation
Lockhart’s El Paso corpus is exhausted as a customer source: seven TRG customers (Union, Nicholson, Empire Products, Victory, Lone Star Bottling Works, Mistletoe, Dairy League) and one negative case (Texas Bottling Works). The thinness of TRG’s footprint in the most thoroughly documented bottling market in Texas — ~600 miles from the plant — is itself evidence for the truck-distribution-radius thesis: El Paso was reachable but marginal territory.