Janice’s athlete’s foot Barrel

Janice wrote me about a 21-inch-tall barrel with iron hoops, or bands, inscribed “Onox Prevents Athletes Foot.” (sic) It belonged to Janice’s mother. I’ve seen many treasured antiques in my thirty years as an appraiser, but never seen a treasured “athlete’s foot” medicine container. Still, Janice treasures it, so here goes a valuation.

Shippers have used barrels as a container for bulk goods, wine, beer and spirits, for more than 2,000 years. They’re still made today by coopers, the term for one who makes them. Barrels lost their position as the number one transport vessel only in recent history. At the beginning of the 20th century containerization changed. When the corrugated fiberboard/cardboard box appeared in the 19th century they lost further ground with the invention of pallet-based shipping.

Traditional Barrels

Typically they’re made with staves of wood heated and bent, then held together with metal hoops. This technique originated in ancient Phoenicia with the boat builders. In the first century Pliny the Elder wrote of winemakers of the Alps (Gauls) shipping their wares to Rome in specially designed wooden containers: barrels. What makes barrels special is their  convex shape, bulging in the middle. The bulge makes it easy to roll a barrel on its side, changing direction without much friction. The shape also distributes stress evenly.

Janice’s Barrel

Janice’s consists of four hoops made of galvanized iron. The hoops aren’t equally distributed because the pressure factor requires one hoop to be irregular. The second from the bottom, most notably, appears nearest the fullest part of the barrel. Coopers, or barrel makers, call this the “head” or “chime” hoop. Before the development of galvanized iron, coopers used flexible wood bits, called withies, and needed more than four wooden hoops to secure the barrel. Withies secured the full top and bottom third of each barrel.

As for Janice’s barrel, I didn’t find a company called Onox or a medicine of that name. But a similar late 19th-century wooden barrel advertising Hires Root Beer sold for $300.