8/31/03 Much anticipation surrounded today's dig. I got permission on an 1844 place via my coworker Rod.  I had been explaining the hobby and took some bottles to work from the previous dig. He liked them and even took some home. His dad has a couple of juicy rentals and he sealed the deal. I stopped by earlier in the week and easily located three spots. I tried keeping it a secret from Steve, that didn't last long. I had to spill the beans. We have been on a little dry spell for good bottles and thought our luck had to change.    

Watch out, Steve has on his game face

Probe Master Steve verified the pits and we started digging. An unembossed amber medicine was the first bottle to pop out. It was about 1' down. A couple of clam shells also started to show. I have seen shells in pits before, and we are a stone's throw away from the river. We thought it would be neat to save some and find some use for them.  Down a little more, some deep aqua shards and part of a "This bottle never sold" comes out. Now, even more clam shells, let's start a pile. The pit got deeper and deeper and so did the shells. I am not joking, every shovel came out with a couple shells on it. We quit piling them up, it was to much work, hundreds of shells. I wonder if they enjoyed them that much or if that was all there was to eat. The pit ended up being 7' deep. The bottles were kind of thin. Some bunk medicines, flavorings, flasks, a Lydia Pinkham's, and  a quilted 1/2 pint flask. All '80s stuff, where are the sodas and beers?

Some shells     Slim pickings

We probed a spot next to the privy we just dug. It might be an extension of the same one, we couldn't stand to see another shell and decided to dig another and come back to this one. To make a long story short and spare me the agony of recalling this pit, it sucked. Another 7' hole full of rocks. Where did all these rocks come from? They rest of the yard wasn't like this. Every time we were going to hang it up another layer would pop up with a enough shards to keep us interested.  We did get a little porcelain figure of a boy on a chamber pot, and one deep aqua green  "Jettine" bottle from Chicago. 

We had been digging for 7 hours and I was beat.   We decided to come back some other time and check out the other shell pit. 2 blocks down  another friend from work has a house. Troy told me to come over and dig up whatever we want to. The ground here is so hard. It hasn't rained in weeks, and probing is a tedious chore. We easily located a pit in his garden. Another 7' hole. He wasn't home but said he didn't care if we dug the garden, but Steve and I decide to wait until he was there just to be sure. We called it a day, taking home very few bottles for the energy expended. Still, there are days we can't get permission to dig or find no pits or bottles and would be wishing to get what we did today. The next dig will be the one!