National Insulator Association President Tom Katonak sent Crown Jewels the following letter regarding insulators made by Boston Bottle Works that have been found in the American Southwest.

A marvelous article on the Boston Bottles (June issue)! This note is just to update the information on the New Mexico Connection regarding the Bostons. You noted that "broken fragments of Bostons have been found in a mining district in New Mexico": True enough. Actually two mining camps, Madrid and nearby San Pedro. Jim Garcia found nearly half a CD 158.2 in the actual town of Madrid about four years ago, and I have found a number of fragments on the San Pedro mine line. The question is, why are these Bostons found? Where did they come from?

A few years ago, Dept. of Interior folks asked me to catalog and describe the insulators and telegraph artifacts in the Fort Union archives over in NE New Mexico. In the process, I noted two examples of CD 731.1s, a single CD 731, two CD 126s and three CD 158.2 Bostons. I speculated at the time that the original glass insulators on the early '70s military telegraph line through Ft. Union were the threadless 731 variants. In the mid to late 70s, replacements were made with the self-threading CD 158.2s, probably delivered to the fort via the Santa Fe Trail. The military telegraph line was abandoned immediately upon the 1880 arrival of the AT&SF railway in Watrous, a few miles to the southeast of Fort Union. This would have made the Bostons available for reuse on ranches and mines throughout New Mexico.

Chris Buys' finds of Boston barrels and threadless pieces south of Ft. Craig in the early 70s (see CJOW, Feb. 72) and Carl Rusk's recovery of a Boston near Ft. Selden confirms the use of these pieces on the NM military telegraph lines. In addition, I believe Tommy Bolack also found one or more 158.2s south of Socorro back in the late 60s.

There are additional reports of a few more Bostons being found here in the State, and in each case they are associated with the original telegraph line.

Having said all this, they're still very difficult to find! As Chris Buys once said, "New Mexico is an awful big desert!"

Note: In July I purchased the CD 158.2 Boston Bottle shown above from the widow of a man who once told me he dug it while hunting bottles in Arizona. The insulator is broken and heavily stained with alkali, indicating that it spent many decades buried in desert soil.    Howard Banks