A Dingo Took My Baby!
I had been keeping my eye on a local farmhouse which had been marked for demolition. It was circa 1870. New businesses were coming and a road was needed. I had probed a bunch when the house was standing but wasn’t able to find the privy. (This is often the case with farm houses having unclear boundaries.) On the way home from work one day I popped over to see how the graders had been doing and a beautiful sight met my eyes: a field of nothing but brown clay and then a 8×4 patch of night soil! I dashed over to find shards of a “Lyon’s Kathiron for the Hair” bottle sitting on top. The graders had taken off the top 5 feet of the privy for me; how kind. I went home and told my very loving and understanding wife that this was it! I simply had only that evening to dig as the graders would be there at 5am the next morning to take off another 2 feet of soil. I ate dinner as fast as I could , kissed my boy goodnight and dashed off to the site. I was like a pig in mud for the next three hours. The pit was packed with bottles. A lot were un-embossed but I did dig a nice Cunningham’s & Ihmsen embossed flask, very early Browen’s Rat Killer from Wakefield’s &Co, and a flared lip milk glass G W Laird Perfumer New York. Some keepers for sure. ![]()
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Really what defined the pit for me was the crying glass:
olive green Hostetters
yellow green Hostetters
amber double eagle flask pint
Quart pikes peak /man with (…?)rye embossed in panel, iron pontiled
The coyotes were howling and so was I ……. waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa