SEP 19th Digging Results
This house was a real "sleeper". It is owned by Joe, and was the first house on the street from which the street is named. Joe said it was a cabin originally and from the age of some of the bottles I believe him. I stopped to inquire if he would be interested in an archeological dig when I noticed him working outside on the house. Joe is in the process of refurbishing the house for occupancy, doing all the work himself on the weekends.
When I asked him about looking for the old out house he said,"I know where it was". I thought to myself, great it was probably built in the 30's and just torn down. He walked me over to a spot directly behind the house, (actually connected to the house) and said it was here. He said it was inside the house a couple of years ago, and that he tore off the section of house that it was in a while back. Sure enough you could see the outline of the gable roof on the backside of the house in the paint. I looked down at the spot on the ground that he pointed to and sank my probe down to the handle with the utmost signs of a privy just blaring out. At this time Joe said that they had a blast digging bottles out of it. Then I said, "how deep did you dig"? He said about 3 feet, then I said, "do you mind if I dig it again"? He said "knock your self out".
I outlined the spot and set Carl to digging this pit thinking this would be a good beginner pit to do because the chance of finding real old stuff in this one seemed slight. While he was digging I found 2 more pits in the yard and started digging one myself. It was a stone lined pit with tons of potential. About a half hour later I noticed Carl had a perfect square outline going in is pit and I heard him say there was a lot of rocks in it. I got out of my hole to investigate, he was digging a stone lined pit also. His was chock full of bottles and house stuff, JUST LOADED.
Mine wasn't looking so good, just full of huge rocks!
I continued to dig this stone lined pit while Carl worked away in his. He was pulling bottles out every second. The age was 1910 or so and getting older. I had my pit down to about the 4 foot level and decided to fill it, too many rocks. When I walked over to Carls I noticed he was into blown bottles mixed with ABM bottles. He had 50+ bottles out by know.
LOOK AT WHERE THE DOOR USED TO BE, IT'S BEHIND CARL.
Check out the nice stone walls in this pit.They where part of the house foundation on his right.
"EXACTLY WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR NOW"....?
Well by now it was getting dark, so out came the lights. This pit was getting pretty interesting and it was unusually deep for this town. Carl was getting tired of continuously pulling stuff out and needed a break so in I went.
"This was built by someone when Abraham Lincoln was president".
The first real cool bottle to come out was a nice ground top CHRISTMAS FLASK. Also a milk glass Toledo Ohio medicine and NERVE FOOD BOTTLE. The age of the bottles was steadily going back in time.
Bottles just pilling up!
VERY old Detroit Med. that popped out.
At about the 5 foot level we jupped back about another 40 years from the 1890's to 1850's. There was a nice one foot layer of undipped use layer loaded with hinge molds and pontiled bottles. I just used my hands to sift through the layer, pulling a large unusual 5 inch pontiled puff out first!
My bottle fix was being adequately subdued with each handfull of dirt. As I was clearing out a corner up high on the wall, two nice green cone inks fell out. That was a nice surprise!
Another hour of bottle digging and the real winner surfaced. A MICHIGAN PONTILED EYE CURE! This little beauty almost stopped my heart when I saw how small and UNDAMAGED it was. I carefully set it aside so it could aclimate to its new surroundings.
This is a little bute called AVERY'S EYE CURE, from MICHIGAN probably late 1850's to early 1860's. Anybody out there heard of this bottle?
More digging brought up several puffs, a nice litte pontiled utillity, and several broken pontiled medicines.
I left the origin of this bottle out just to be safe for a while, if you know what I mean.
Here is one of those green inks I was telling you about..
This dig was real cool knowing that it was still a functional privy just a couple of years ago. Joe says he still has the 3 hole seat out of it.
Once again the homeowner got a big pile of bottles to start a new bottle collection with, and we added a few new things to our collection also.
See you next time,
Scott
