NATCHEZ — When Jim and Dee Lindley were planning for their new house 11 years ago one thing was a must — lots of display space for the family’s collection of old bottles

And when The Dart landed on Duster Drive in Natchez on Saturday, Jim was more than willing to relive the stories of how those bottles found their way into the display cabinets.

“Most of these bottles I found around Natchez when I was a teenager,” he said. “I’ve just kept them and packed them each time we moved.”

But the bottles weren’t just lying around. Jim and his friends spent many afternoons digging and looking for bottles in different spots around town. Many of the ones in the Lindley’s display cabinets were discovered in the lot behind CableOne on Martin Luther King Street. The others were dug up in the area behind the Malt Shop, Jim said.

“We had a lot of good times digging around people’s flowerbeds,” he said. “Every once and a while, we’d collapse one and take off running.”

Jim said the biggest fear he and his friends had when leading their miniature archaeological digs was getting caught by the police. That almost became a reality once after nearly destroying a flowerbed at someone’s house.

“The bed collapsed, and we took off running,” he said. “Sure enough, when we rounded the corner, the law was sitting right there. We stayed away from that place from then on.”

The bottles do more than conjure up old memories for Lindley. They also offer a glimpse at one portion of Natchez history.

A large portion of the bottles are medicine bottles from local pharmacies. The name of the pharmacy the bottle came from is etched into the bottle.

“You can look at them and see the progression of pharmacies in the town,” he said. “One may say Adams and another will be Adams as well but a little different because that was a different generation of Adams. It is a bit of a Natchez history lesson.”

Also in the bottle collection are inkwells, Coca-Cola bottles and an assortment of other glass bottles.

And accompanying the bottle collection in the display cabinet is a collection of hand-woven pine straw baskets made by Jim’s father.

They vary in size from tiny ones the size of a sewing thimble to larger ones shaped like whiskey jugs. One whiskey-jug-shaped basket is even plugged with a corncob.

“I think he thought the jug shaped ones were cute,” Dee said. “He probably never drank whiskey in his life.”

When the couple moved into the house, they knew what would be stored in the cabinets but the arrangement took a while to get just right.

“We would unpack then and wash them up and I’d arrange them, then Jim would say ‘Oh, I have this box’ and we’d start over with that box,” Dee said. “It took weeks.”

And while the cleaning process doesn’t take near that long, Dee said she still has to set aside nearly an entire day to clean the cabinets and their contents.

“I take out each piece and wash it and clean the shelves and the backs and the doors so it is fairly time consuming,” she said. “But I’m a detail person”