‘Whiskey, Gin and South Jersey Glass.’ Drinking in N.J.’s boozy history.

The thick, amber-colored bottle is shaped like a four-square, colonial house. Impressions in the glass spell out "E.G. Booz...Old Cabin Whiskey."

It is one of the artifacts mentioned in a new exhibit called "Whiskey, Gin and South Jersey Glass." It traces glass production, which some experts say led the nation from Colonial times through the end of Prohibition.

"Bottles were really needed for hard cider, brandy, wine," Gay LeCleire Taylor, a historian and lecturer, told NJ Advance Media this week. "The brandy and whiskey forms of the bottles could be used for just about any alcoholic beverage."

Taylor said the history of glassmaking in South Jersey closely follows the drinking habits of Americans. South Jersey was the epicenter of glass production in the colonies through the Revolutionary War and into Prohibition.

Taylor is scheduled to speak at the reopening of Take Five: Taverns and Temperance , an exhibit at the Harrison Township Historical Society at the Old Town Hall Museum in Mullica Hill on Sunday.

"Colonists really didn't drink water," said Taylor, the former director/curator of the Museum of American Glass at WheatonArts in Millville. "Consuming alcohol was natural."

The Wistar Glass company operated in Alloway, Salem County from 1739 to 1781. The location included close access to all of the essentials of glass making including sand and an abundant supply of trees to make charcoal for fires to blow glass.

It also provided access to the Delaware River for calm waters to transport it to Philadelphia for mass distribution.

The Revolutionary War ended production at the company after Colonial soldiers encamped there. But before the end of the century, bustling glassmaking operations had sprung up at Glass Works in the Woods, 18 miles away in a town now known as Glassboro.

The same elements existed there, abundant trees, sand and waterways. One of the sand pits has been now converted into a $73 million dinosaur fossil park and museum . The facility, part of Rowan University, is expected to open this month.

Taylor said the glass-making industry was key to the economic development and culture of South Jersey and a developing nation. The historical society chronicles the era including the end, with temperance and Prohibition, which ushered in a national ban on alcohol from 1920 to 1933.

But there's a coda that came along in the mid-1800′s. A Vineland, Cumberland County native, John Landis Mason, invented a storage jar with a rubber-sealed top that bore his name, the Mason Jar , Taylor and other historical accounts say. The first jars were blown in Crowleytown, a section of what is now Washington Township, Gloucester County.

Taylor will speak on "Whiskey, Gin and South Jersey glass" on Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Richwood Academy Cultural Center at 836 Lambs Road in Harrison.