Lynnfield-Related Items On eBay, 12/31

Haywards Beverages: I don't believe that I'm familiar with the former Haywards beverage company, despite what has become a growing interest in Lynnfield history. Being a green bottle in this case, it looks like they at least made ginger ale. I'm assuming it wasn't beer either, whatever it was.

The bottles are also somewhat cryptic, since instead of telling you exactly what product they contained, they simply bore the message "Flavor designated by crown." Of course, this was an era when those de-coder buttons were all the rage. Maybe they could also decipher what flavor a given soda was, or at least act as bottle openers.

My own all-time favorite? Grape soda.

I have one anecdote I can share about vintage soda. Once on a road trip we stopped at this Coca Cola museum in Vicksburg, Mississippi. It's not a bad town to stop and check out, but one thing really stands out in my mind from that day – the Coca Cola they served at the old-fashioned fountain there was amazing, the best I had ever had. You could actually sense a lost, vaguely remembered taste in it that could actually be described as "cola" and not so much just "sweet." It turns out that it contained cane sugar instead of corn syrup, which apparently has been the main sweetener in the U.S. products for who knows how many decades. In states like Texas and California, a fair number of people even apparently cross over into Mexico to stock up on soda with cane sugar because of this. Having sampled this soda in the museum that day, I can perfectly well understand why they would feel it worthwhile to make such a shopping trip.

Labor Day, 1909: For some collectors, the long-ago messages scrawled on the back of a postcard can be just as fascinating as the images displayed on the front. Other collectors are just in it for the old stamps. This particular item offers a bit of all three – it shows a very vintage scene (1909) of a boat dock at Suntaug Lake, and it was mailed with one of the 1-cent Ben Franklin stamps that were common at that point. The postcard is marked September 7, 1909 (Labor Day had been a federal holiday about 15 years at that point) and says "How are U, Joe" along with some other line that appears to send greetings to somebody else as well.

Judging by the position of the island in this photo of Suntaug Lake, I'm wondering if these boats once sat on the shore at what is now Newhall Park and whether this was part of the Suntaug Lake Inn or some separate enterprise.

Town Lyne Matchbook: For only a buck, you can pick up this old matchbook from the Towne Lyne House. When this was made, the restaurant was under the "personal supervision of Noble Jackson." On a side note, with a name like Noble Jackson, you'd think this man would have been born to fight crime rather than manage the Towne Lyne House. This image is also a departure from the usual photo of the white building next to a traffic-free Route 1 that has more generally characterized this former Lynnfield landmark.