By Julia Train
Austin Contegiacomo had just gotten off a 24-hour shift for the U.S. Coast Guard and was walking his dog on the beach near Margate Pier on Feb. 17 when he found nearly a dozen Prohibition-Era whiskey bottles.
Contegiacomo was playing fetch with his sheepadoodle, Koda, and catching up with a friend on the phone when the dog’s attention averted from the game and toward the sand, he told NJ Advance Media.
“I take him to the beach to play just about every day,” Contegiacomo told the New York Post. “I was throwing the ball — and my dog tends to rub himself in stuff that smells weird. So there’s this brown bottle in the sand and he starts rubbing on it.”
He said he initially thought it was trash.
“I thought, ‘Oh man, it looks like a bottle of pee,’” he said to the New York Post. “So I was yelling at him to get off it, then maybe five feet ahead was another one. And as soon as he got off that one, he ran up to the next one and started rubbing on that.”
He eventually discovered 11 sealed containers, embossed with the name “Lincoln Inn” and an illustration of a man on horseback.
The bottles were lying flat, protruding from the wet sand just south of the pier. Each was still filled with golden liquid, presumably alcohol, and scattered among shells and debris.
Contegiacomo called a friend. After a quick internet search, they learned that Lincoln Inn was produced at a distillery in Montreal from the early 1930s until the 1970s, when the company shut down.
He then decided to take the bottles home to find out more information. Contegiacomo took off his jacket, picked up all the bottles, stashed them in his jacket and tied it up like a sack.
After bringing them home, Contegiacomo shared his discovery on Reddit, where a community of bottle-digging enthusiasts and whiskey aficionados quickly took interest. Members of the groups pointed him to a diamond-shaped embossing on the bottom of the bottles.
The mark, the letter “D” inside a diamond, is from Dominion Glass in 1928 — eight years after alcohol was outlawed throughout the United States.
At that time, government officials significantly strengthened certain restrictions on bootleggers by specifically requiring that particular imported bottles clearly show from where they came.
The New Jersey shoreline was a vital pathway for illegally importing alcohol throughout Prohibition.
U.S. Coast Guard ships worked as a main policing entity. Margate, sitting south of Atlantic City — a well-known center regarding illegal alcohol headed for Philadelphia — was favorably situated concerning those actions.
Contegiacomo speculates about the possibility that the bottles he discovered were previously abandoned there by smugglers, but exactly how they ended up in the water remains a mystery.
Some of the whiskey bottles were clear, while others appeared hazy — something Contegiacomo discovered might be related to filtration. He decided to gift a bottle to each of his friends. He gave one to his father and kept one for himself.
Julia is a recent Rider University graduate, where she studied multiplatform journalism and social media strategies. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, trying new coffee shops, photography and the beach. She can be reached at juliatrainmedia@gmail.com or connect with her on Instagram @juliatrain
