Upper Peninsula Bottling Works (Hill & Bietila)

05 Jan 2022, last revised 21 Dec 2024

With only two known bottles, Hill & Bietila's bottling works was seemingly short-lived. Expectedly, we could not find the Upper Peninsula Bottling Works with Hill & Bietila as proprietors listed in the Polk directories.

Newspaper ad - Sep 1910

In Jul 1910, "John Hill and Jacob Bietala" purchased the business of the "U.P. Bottling Works" (1) or "Upper Peninsula Bottling Company", which was located on Fifth St. and Pine St. and had been owned by nearly 100 shareholders (2). They planned to conduct the business as it was formerly (1).

In Sep 1910, they were listed with other Calumet and Laurium bottlers in a notice of price increases due to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. We then found no other mention of their existence. They were not inspected by the Michigan Department of Labor in Sep - Nov 1910 when other Calumet businesses were inspected (4). We could not find them in the 1910 U.S. Federal Census as bottlers (5). They were not listed in the 1912 directory (3). We are left with two rare and beautiful bottles from their brief existence as bottlers in the Copper Country.

Citations

1. anonymous. (1910, Jul 08). U. P. Bottling Works sold. The Calumet News (Calumet, MI). p. 5.
2. anonymous. (1910, Jul 09). Purchase bottling works. The Evening Copper Journal (Hancock, MI). p. 6.
3. R. L. Polk & Co. 1912. 1912 Calumet, Hancock, Houghton and Laurium Directory. R. L. Polk & Co., Publishers. Detroit, MI.
4. State of Michigan Department of Labor. 1911. Second Annual Report of the Department of Labor of the State of Michigan. Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., State Printers. Lansing, MI.
5. U.S. Census Bureau. 1910 United States Federal Census. accessed on ancestry.com.