4/10/04

    Craig and Steve warmed up for the weekend by digging a small pit on Friday. They reported not finding much of anything.

    We broke our record Saturday in the number of pits dug. The old mark had been 7.  This day we dug 9. I am sure this will stand for a while. It was a full 12 hours of digging with close to 4 hours of drive time to boot.   

    We were digging on the notorious "Whiskey Row" . Aptly named for the sheer number of bunk pint whiskey flasks found in all pits. It must have been an exciting area to live in back in the day. Anyway, we have given up on this area many times only to find one pit that will keep us coming back. The funny thing is that every yard has a minimum of seven post 1900 pits. Then you find might find an 1850s privy. But, there are no pits from that 50 year gap. They have to be there, but where?

    The pits we got into where all late 1890's to early 1900s. I was pretty excited that we found a several crown top sodas we haven't seen before. They were: Toole, Gallagher, Shaffner, a Hackett and Peck and two different E A Lufkins. We also got a straight sided Coke, to bad it didn't have a city name.

Straight sided Coke next to a Hackett & Peck

Three more local sodas

    A bit of irony struck late in the afternoon. We were digging a pit by the fence when the neighbor spied us. He wanted to know what was going on. So, we showed off our finds and talked for a bit. He told us of some of his old bottles. His favorite was a Dougan Milk. I figured this must be a pyroglazed bottle. We have dug tons of milks and have never even seen a shard of one of these. I jump in the pit and two minutes later we have an embossed quart Dougan! I called the guy back over and showed him. How funny!

    Craig and Steve are animals when it comes to digging. It was late in the afternoon, we were tired of digging crap. We needed to decide to open another or pack it up. Of course, two seconds later, the decision is made and we are digging! This was the deepest one of the day. It ended up being a seven footer. This is where we found the three crowns in the fill . When we got to the layer, it was full of bunk whiskeys. You could not shovel with out hitting them. That is all that was down there.  Not even shards of anything else. Hundreds of them.

    After we were done, and the pit filled. Someone, and I can't remember who, asked if we were digging another. Steve said, "I'll dig, but only if we do the one in the other lot." Well, that was all the arm twisting Craig and I needed. This pit was next to a tree and the roots made the digging tough. We got to the layer and the bottles were thick. We even got into a couple blobs. A Fred Miller from Milwaukee was the only intact embossed one. Luckily, the couple others had probe holes and were unembossed. Also, we found a Knorrs Hien Fong Essence, 3 different Swedish Essences from Sheboygan(the best being a Blood Purifier, of course broken). Two insulators. A new record was also set with a total of seven marbles found. I guess it ended up being a "marble-ous" dig after all!

Plenty of bottles in this one