4/17/04

    Steve and I went back to "Whiskey Row" . Craig was absent on this dig. Can you believe he would go to Florida and miss a day of bottle digging? It was a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining and the weather was warm. About the only thing that could make this day better would be a loaded, killer pontil pit!

    We started early as usual.  We found the old pit a few weeks ago, and a bunch of new ones. Where are the hutches and blobs? We opened three pits  in this empty lot we had been working.  We found lots of bottles. Pretty much the same stuff we have been finding the last couple weeks. A Red Key Mason's Patent and a cool miniature baby feeder were the best bottles. The baby feeder was a little different. It may have been a joke or maybe a whiskey bottle. It seemed very sarcastic. It's embossed: For You Baby/ 5-10 Testimony/10-15 Ceremony/ 15-20 Matrimony/ 20-30 Alimony/ 30-40 Easy Money/ Nothing Doing. On the back is Teddy's Pet/ Peaceful Nights.

   Cool Feeder

    It was around 10am and we were wondering what to do. There are three more pits in this yard. When probed, they feel like post 1900 stuff. We didn't feel like digging another one of these today. Then, I noticed the neighbor Ray was home. We had been digging in his yards the last couple weeks. I called him over to show him the day's finds and to ask permission to open up a couple more privies in his yard. Ray said it wasn't a problem, so we packed up and moved next door.

    The house we were digging behind looks very old. We knew there had to be an old on there somewhere. Steve and I lined up shoulder to shoulder and probed the yard systematically. We had the yard about all probed. We found a few more pits that didn't feel to promising. I went to the truck to get something. When I got back, Steve had three more marked out on the south lot line. He thought they felt a little better. We picked one and started finding the edges. I felt some rocks and kept moving in a straight line. Sure enough, the rocks followed this line. "Steve, I think this is a stone liner," I exclaimed. We tried probing the other walls nothing. Wait, it goes the other way. This is a pit next to the one we were going to open! A few pokes on an angle verified it to be a stone liner. Cool, usually this means an older pit in these parts.

View of the stone liner

    We dug down and found the outline of the neatly stacked stones. We continued down following the walls. The first bottle to come out was an amber Washington crossing the Delaware whiskey flask. I was all pumped up until Steve showed me the screw top. This was a bottle from the 1920s. Maybe this thing was cleaned out periodically and has bunk bottles in it. We got down about six feet before the use layer was found. It ended up having 1890s stuff on top and 1870s on the bottom of the layer. We even found one open pontil unembossed medicine on the bottom. This must have been a pontil pit originally. To bad the honey dippers got all the good stuff.

    There was a ton of glass and  shards. There was some killer broken stuff. Four cathedral pickles, one that looked pontilled. Three or four Drake's Plantation Bitters in amber. Two Doyle's Hops Bitters, and three or four Dr. Hostetters  Stomach Bitters.

    Some of the whole stuff included: An amber and a green Epilepticide, cobalt Hooker's For The Throat and Lungs, amber Hooker's Blood Elixer, Cuticura System For Curing Constitutional Humors, Ayers Sarsaparilla, Madame Ruppert's Face Bleach, and Dr. Marshall's Lung Syrup.

Stone liner take

   Also, "Whiskey Row" lived up to it's name by providing at least one bunk flask in all of the four pits we dug.