8/20/05

   The excitement level was high this weekend. We were back in the yard where we found the threadless insulator. This yard was in Pontilville, and Steve had a sneaking suspicion a pit of age was heading our way. 

   The lady who owns the house is pretty cool. Steve stopped by during the week to ask her what time we could start. She said 3 PM was a good time. Steve laughed and asked her if we could start a little earlier than that if we didn't make noise. She said it would be OK.

  We spent a little more time probing the  yard. To our delight, we found a couple more diggable spots that we hadn't the last time. A flip of a coin decided which pit would be first, and we began.

  The first shards out were some older fruit jar pieces with ground tops. About two feet down we hit an ash layer that was loaded with bottles. Under that, the bottles seemed to get newer. How could that be? Late throws? Anyway, there were plenty of bottles to keep us busy. Also, Steve was in his glory in this hole. There was a ton of metal tidbits, the most by far I have ever seen come out of a hole. Steve likes to clean the crusted pieces up and usually finds some unexpected pieces.

Shard

Bottles everywhere 

Onion skin marble from the dirt pile

Fancy door bell handle

Giddy up

Peach pits

Started out as a blob of rusty metal. Steve pulled it from the acid bath and discovered a mermaid!

  Pit #2 was on the other side of the yard. We started this one and found some scroll flask shards right away! Steve found the broken base and it had a super crude open pontil. We were pretty excited, the first pontil pit of the year. I grabbed the sifter and put it to work. Steve was in the hole and said, " You are not going to believe this." He hands me up the corner of a yellowish scroll flask. 

I am sad

Dang the luck. I was up next, and taking my time. The dirt was very packed making the shoveling tough. A bunch of bricks didn't help either. I was being careful not to wreck anything. I needed to move some dirt out of the hole. I started shoveling it out while Steve sifted through. Next thing he is saying he found a coin. I laughed and said, "Yeah right." No joke, he is holding an 1837 penny!  

  This slowed things down even more, we didn't want to miss a thing. The afternoon got eaten up in a hurry. The pit actually had 5 broken scrolls. Two aqua quarts, one aqua pint, the yellow one, and a light green one. The was a small embossed broken  op cylinder, but it was to far gone to glean any information from it.

Green shard

Shards

   Licking our wounds we headed for the next set of pits. Steve thought he would spice it up a bit and told me to pick a pit and I would get everything out of it, and he would get everything out of the other. Usually I get the crap end of the stick on a deal like this, but I bit anyway. Of course my pit was pretty bunky with mostly slicks and common bottles. It would be pretty easy for Steve's pit to out do this one, or so I thought. We tore into his and it was complete ash save one crappy little cologne bottle. We had a pretty good laugh!

Cool forest green Seville Packing pickle New York