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Britt Preyer hit pay dirt.

Hands and clothes filthy, Preyer returned home the other day with boxes of bottles filled with family heirlooms - ancient bottles of Vicks VapoRub and other products made by Vick Chemical Co.

His great-grandfather, Lunsford Richardson, invented Vicks VapoRub in the 1890s in eastern North Carolina. Lunsford perfected and named it in a downtown Greensboro drugstore he bought in 1898. The product's name honored his brother-in-law Dr. Joshua Vick.

Preyer had gotten a call from a relative about land being cleared for apartments on Milton Street, off Spring Garden Street. Earth-moving machinery had unearthed thousands of old medical bottles. Vick Chemical's main plant had stood on the site from 1910 until it was demolished in the mid-1960s.

"They were just dumped there,'' Preyer says of the bottles. "Maybe it was a sample overrun. It's hard to know."

Digging with a garden trowel, Preyer in 2½ hours unearthed several hundred bottles of various colors and sizes. He returned the next day and took home several hundred more. Some still contained Vicks VapoRub.

Born in 1951, Preyer says he never saw the Vick plant on Milton, but does recall a second plant, built in 1936, at Cridland Drive and Wendover Avenue - across from Latham Park. That plant made cough drops. The sweet scent of menthol and camphor wafted through the neighborhood.

Preyer had some old Vicks bottles bought at antique shops. He thought he knew the size and shape of all company bottles, "but some of these I have never seen before."

The most numerous are tiny, spherical and royal blue with "Vicks" on one side and "Drops'' on the other. These likely were samples salesmen distributed. Some of these and other bottles probably date to the early 20th century. A construction worker found among them a Coca-Cola bottle with a 1915 date.

Historian Gayle Fripp, in her book, "Greensboro: A Chosen Center," wrote that Vick Chemical increased VapoRub sales "through the distribution of free samples and five million jars were sent to potential customers in 1917," she said.

The Milton Street plant was torn down after Vick Chemical - by then known as Richardson-Vicks - built a big new plant on West Market Street in the mid-1960s. Procter & Gamble now owns the company and continues making VapoRub and other Vicks products.

The Milton Street plant may be long gone, but not the aroma, once machinery started disturbing the land.

"Sometimes you can get a whiff of the Vicks,'' says Chris Staley, construction foreman at the apartment site.

Preyer plans to give bottles to family members at the next family reunion and will offer some to the Greensboro Historical Museum.

The tiny bottles have added sentimental value to him. His grandfather, W.Y. Preyer - who married Lunsford Richardson's daughter, Mary Norris Richardson - started as a traveling Vicks salesman. He handed out samples like those his grandson dug up.

It took the worldwide flu epidemics of 1918 to 1920 to make VapoRub a staple in medicine chests nationwide. In the 1920 outbreak, demand for VapoRub in Greensboro was so great the product had to be rationed, according to Fripp.

Preyer believes the VapoRub in the old bottles remains potent. He has a bottle he estimates that's at least 50 years old he bought at an antique shop. When he feels an ailment coming on, he reaches for the bottle on his office shelf and rubs in VapoRub. Does it still have punch?

"Absolutely," he says.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net