Bristol was once the whiskey capital of the region, with multiple distilleries and countless competing brands. It’s a period of history that often gets overlooked, Barnette said, perhaps because people are ashamed of Bristol’s liquor-tinged past.But alcohol was big business here, especially when Tennessee voted to go dry more than a decade before prohibition took hold nationally. People from all over would come to the city on the state line to buy a drink, he said.Those bottles have ended up in all kinds of strange places.Barnette has found them sealed up in walls of old homes, suggesting that the city’s brick masons in those days enjoyed a nip of whiskey every now and then but had to hide their bottles from their employers.

The medicine bottles Barnette has collected tell the story of Bristol’s drug business. Back in the early 1900s, pharmacies lined State Street and each mixed its own concoctions and notions designed to cure all manner of ailments. Every bottle bore the name of the pharmacy that mixed its contents, and the city is still today littered with the old glass containers, if you know where to look.

For Barnette, that’s the thrill of it. He couldn’t estimate the value of his collection because he only sells bottles when he’s looking to buy different ones.His only regret is that he didn’t start collecting sooner. He got his start in the early 1970s and really picked up during the nationwide bicentennial celebrations of 1976.

"I’d hate to think of how many bottles have gone through my hands over the years," Barnette said. "How many I wish I’d kept..............