Shivar Bottling Company

I saw an article about a former mineral water/soda making factory from the early 1900s that was very near where Jerry hunts in Fairfield County.  He did not know anything about it so today to get out of the house after five days of rain we drove up there to find it.    It was not raining today after a night of downpours, just very wet and very cold, only 45F  (7C) today for the high.   

We found the location way back off the back road.  You can see how narrow the old road was in this photo.    The road ran next to the railroad which is probably how the man shipped his bottles of water out.    The six cisterns where he pumped in the  mineral/spring water were still standing.    

 I found this information about this location.

The six  cylindrical cisterns were built around 1900 from stucco and concrete.  The water came from a spring which was purported to have healing properties by Mr. Nathanial Shivar,  a shoe salesman in Columbia who came to the  Blair area to recover from an illness and drank the water from the spring when he stayed with Mrs. Newbill, a widow.   He later married her.  By 1907, he was selling bottles of mineral water as well as ginger ale from a brick processing plant near the cisterns.   In 1915 the plant burned but he rebuilt and continued to do well until right before Shivar's death in 1922.  The business manager took over the bottling plant in 1941 even though he ran the plant after Shivars death under several owners.   In 1957 another fire burned the bottling plant and the enterprise was abandoned.   Those six cylinders are still standing though.  They look like hobbit houses in the woods.  

I love these little quirky historical places.  The site I found that had this information has scads of historical places like this.    I can see many more road trips in the future.