1-25-04

    It has been very cold. We knew the frost was deep, but we went out anyway. After last weeks dig, I ran into Kurt Buggs. He was salting the  sidewalk of an empty lot we were digging by. He is the owner of Signworks, a local sign company. I showed him some of the bottles we had found.  He thought it was interesting and said he would let us dig. It is fun talking with the property owners that are interested in what we do. It is even better when they know the history of the site. His dad grew up on  the block, and his family owned a local store that used to sit on the now empty lot.

    We saw huge depression on the lot line. It was about 10'x6'. We used a splitting mall to pound the probe through a foot of frost.  Sure enough there was a pit there. We hacked the frozen ground for two hours. We finally had a 3'x3' hole. It was to small but had to do.

The start             Hacking the frozen tundra

We planned on making it wider as we went down. The first foot down a teaser broken blob neck was discovered. I started quietly humming the "blob and hutches" song. The next 6' of fill contained very little glass, which was broken anyway. But, the shards were looking promising. The best being yellow amber shards of Hostetter type bottles. Steve made it to the use layer. The first shovel full there uncovered a pile of bottles in the corner. One of the bottles was a "liquid food" the others were 1/2 pint flasks, which we find a lot of out here.  After that, the pit petered out. The glass was mostly broken and not very abundant. The pit was also a lot smaller than the depression. The final dimension on the pit was 4'x4'x8'. We ended up with a marble, horseshoe, and the bottles mentioned above.

The great news is a neighbor came out with her nephews to see what we were doing. She too found it interesting and volunteered her yard for a dig. This will have to wait until spring. The frost has finally won.