We set everything up and started digging, a few TOC shards came out but we were digging mostly bricks, yuk. It was hot and the digging was slow. When we got to 3 feet it was clear that this was just a junker and we were wasting our time. So what were we to do? it was only 10.30 and we had already struck out!  I had an idea to check on another site which is pretty much a standing permission and it had already produced a pit for me 2 years ago. I walked on over and hit  a pit within a few minutes…boo yaka.  I can’t tell you how on earth I missed this before, but there she was ready to be pillaged… and I wasn’t about to start asking questions.

The part of town where the privies have two trash layers… one above, one below.

I went and grabbed the lads and we loaded the tools back up and headed on over to the new pit.  The shovels went through the soil like a hot knife through butter, no bricks ,no roots, heck! no grass either, just creeping charlie and dirt.

This pit had the classic privy  feel to it … 4 ft of dirt and then that hollow “clink” hello, I’m a bottle surrounded by loamy poop dirt “clunk” sound.

We took turns in the pit and everything was peachy, except for the pit bull next door who did not stop barking for HOURS. Literally.    The glass was coming out by the bucket load and there were plenty of keepers for everyone, even for one of the neighbors who popped by for a gander. I can’t even try and tell you which order they came out in, but who would even care about that right?  Maybe if it was a pontiled pit I would

Aaron earning his poop wings

Lads with the take

My split of the take;

The shaving mug still works… the kid’s have their tooth brushes in it now

Got enough nic nacs to have a garage sale. (Don’t tell grandma Zilmer)

…this piece of solid brass is a candle holder, it can be screwed to the wall and used again… and you can bet it will. Hoopla!

Oh! And the pit bull got taken away by the animal control later the afternoon. Never a dull moment indeed.

Anyway, I got a call from him recently and he  had moved again and was living in Norman, Oklahoma… out of all places!

He said that he had found himself a bird and is very happy.  He does miss privy digging but said “she’s better that a bitters bottle” I expect we’ll see him pass on through here one day and we’ll have to line up a celebrity dig to keep all his fans happy.

Ahh, I’m getting all nostalgic now.

Here… let’s have a tricky montage.

Okay, that’s enough.

Instead, let’s take a look at this bottle I just dug. It was one of only two bottles in the whole dang hole. Whole… hole…whole… hole… wierd.

The word ‘fag’ is derived from ‘faggot’ which is an archaic name for a bundle of sticks, especially ones that are burning.  So this is how we get the slang word ‘fag’ for a cigarette.  Also ‘fag’ is a derivative  for ‘fagot ‘ which is an obsolete name for a contemptible old woman or unpaid male servant.

So I am at a loss to what this was used for…?

But one thing is for sure, drinking it didn’t stop you becoming gay, burning sticks or becoming an unpaid indentured servant…or maybe it did. Who knows?

As we got to the 3 ft level everything was really loose, much more than normal. I decided to see if I could hit the bottom to get an idea of what  the use layer was like below …only to pull out a Jewel Osco Cola can and a stainless steel knife with a plastic handle!

We had been well and truly had!   I heard those dreaded words echo in my ears ” Sorry mate, this pit’s already been dug.”

Here is Sean with the take.

Sunnuva!

Digging day arrived and I was ready to haul some poop, big time! The pit had potential to produce, and the map showed an outhouse / building in 1886. Sean came prepared to dig with his new Wellington boots he purchased from WalMart.  Grinning like the Cheshire Cat, he pulled out the shiny-just-been-made-in-the-HeilongJiang-province (yeah, I can’t pronounce it either) rubber boots only to find some knuckle head had put two left feet size 8 and 9 together.  Now I know that there might be some folks who would find these boots a perfect fit but Sean is from the Springfield in Illinois… not Arkansas!

We hit some  big roots about a foot down and they were some work to remove, but with the thought of glass beneath they were no match for us.

Isaac turned up and the questions started rolling. After taking several turns in the pit we got to about 4 ft.  Having pulled out some later milks and  some slicks, we were simply biding our time with the expectation that some nice embossed local beers would come out. I was in the pit and handed out a bucket of fill for Isaac to throw on the pile and got back to scratching around. Suddenly both Sean and Isaac yelled, “WATCH OUT” in unison and WHACK! half a brick rolled down  2 ft of the pile and fell about another 2 1/2 feet and smacked me right on the head. I won’t write what I said because my mother reads this, and I’d never hear the end of it if I cursed.  Now if  it wasn’t bad enough that my head nearly got split in half by a dirty brick, the sky was looking rather menacing too and it was not long before the deluge began. I ran and got the canopy from my van. We set it up, getting absolutely soaked in the process, only then to watch as mini streams of water flow into the pit! Yes… we were digging on an incline. It had quickly gone from “Yay! We’re digging!” too “Boo, let’s fill it in.”

Pesky Crown Tops!

The pit  was producing but it was on the wrong side of 1900. Finally the rain stopped and we fillderin. Sean got the best bottle of the day: a Dr Reeder’s something something tar cure from Peoria,Ill. Isaac took a bunch of stuff too and I went home with a few milks and a lump on my head right about where # 13 is

I did actually get to dig in early April on an 1890’s house, but at that age it is fairly uneventful in the interest department. I  was digging with Scotty and we hauled a fair amount of glass but none to write home about, wait, isn’t that what I’m doing now!

Most  of the bottles were hauled off to the homeowner to rejoice over… I kept just a few bits and bobs.

Here are 3 mint condition pint Ball Mason jars from the pit. After 100 years of containing poo they  now contain whatever tasty beverage I fancy on a hot summer’s day  (usually Gin and Tonic…mmmm)

Here is a mustache cup… this was designed to keep the wife’s mustache from getting wet. She must have thrown it away when her husband finally got her to shave

” William darling, brew me a cuppa will you”

Who knows what this happy chappy was all about? He’s made of ceramic though. Who’d ever have let their kids play with a doll  which looked like a drunk Yorkshire man?

” Hullo lass, fancy comin’ down t’pub furra pint’o Samuel’s?”

Silly people!

I covered over the hole and  moved on finding only a few wheat pennies. I thought that I’d better go back to the same hole where the dollar came out “just in case”. On sweeping over the hole I got another 95 on the VDI saying it  was a quarter. What! I figured it was some kind of ‘ghosting’ or residual memory from the coin being in there for the last 120 years. I kept on getting a strong signal but could see nothing but then found it with the pin pointer. It looked like a clad quarter because it seemed to have a heavy patina but upon closer inspection I could see that this was anything but clad. It turned out to be a 1893 Barber quarter. OH YEAH!  So I learned a major lesson …Always check your hole again!

Now the ground is frozen and I can’t dig for anything.

Well, what’s a guy to do with half a day left?  ”Let’s go metal detecting!” I declared, so we headed off to a Civil War camp Sean knows about.

We spent about 2 hrs poking around this field but my Bounty Hunter metal detector (you know, the kind that when it finds metal sounds like someone’s beeping their horn at you) was not really up to the task in such a “trashy” field.  It is great in town detecting coins but really lacks the pinpointing abilities of  the pro detectors. One mangled bullet later we headed home.

The prospect of detecting a Civil War camp was too much to resist despite cold weather approaching, so Sean and I arranged a whole day to comb the field.  The day finally arrived, me with my new (second hand) White’s XLT detector and Sean with his all-singing, all-dancing, state of the art GPS PhD all-metal-jump-out-of-the-field-into-my-pouch detector… I could hardly stop thinking about how I would be coming home with a 3 gallon bucket of bullets, buckles and buttons!  But alas, I was deluded by my own ignorance once again.  In the morning the frozen ground yielded nothing more that a handful of iron nails for me… Sean got a general service button.  We headed off to the other spot we had previously detected to see if we could do a little better.  I think the setting on my detector was high and discriminated out a little too much trash, but I was able to find a bullet casing and a fired bullet… boo.  It wasn’t until mid afternoon I got a strong target and I uncovered a nice general service button in great condition… WOO HOO!   It was a long time to spend looking for ‘treasure’, but it’s pretty cool to uncover a piece of Civil War history  buried in the ground for the last 150 years.

Hunting season over.  See you in the spring!

I figured the house was about 1880 by the style of architecture. I knocked on the door and spoke to a lovely old lady who was surprised and didn’t think there was an outhouse in her yard… so I invited her to a depressed area along the fence line that  I had spotted. As I  pushed my probe to about 5 ft there was a resounding crunch. She looked at me and said, ” That sounded like glass.”  I agreed and asked if she’d mind if I dug a hole; she said, “I don’t suppose it would hurt.”  I have learned through experience that just because someone agrees to let you dig it does not mean you can dig!  Often a spouse will say “NO!” even when the other half has said “yes”.  So I gently asked if she thought if her husband would mind; she looked at me seriously and replied, ” I don’t think so, he’s been dead for 2 years.” …. Ouch, but you gotta ask!

We had friends visiting a week or two later and I asked if my buddy John would like to experience a dig.  Now, John is a grease monkey at heart and would be happier laying on his back under a 57 Ford pick-up with a 7/16th wrench in one hand, and a bottle of Miller High Life in the other while oil is dripping on his forehead… but as privy digging was still dirty he’d give it a try.

Here is John hitting the top of the use layer.

Oh… and a nice variant local drugstore I had not seen before!

It became quite clear early on that it was going to be  a long day.  We  had probed this out at 8 ft and at 5 ft we were digging out plenty of glass.  Now that’s what I call a use layer!

We dug 2 sizes of this German Cough and Kidney Cure from Peoria.

And what is really unusual is that we pulled out this intact 1/2 gallon fruit jar with no damage.  Fruit jars are probably the most common glass to come out of a privy but they always seem broken ( for obvious reasons) and this sample was super whittled to boot!

A window sill in Rockford is now sporting John and Carmen’s keepers from the split … nice window glass.

I’m not sure but I think that this bottle comes from Normal, Illinois.  ’National’ was a company in Normal which sold  a Kidney and Liver Cure  but I have never seen this advertised…I feel some research coming on.

I cannot remember how many bottles we dug… probably about 100+, but I only kept about 9: The fruit jar, pain cure, Excelsoir hutch and about 6 local drugstores. Carmen wrote and told me she got fed up cleaning bottles and the dirty slicks had ended up in the garage!

It was a pretty good dig all being said.  We bottomed out at 8 ft, nearly missing about 18 more inches of the use layer on the way down.  That would have been too sad.

—————————————-

This was not connected with this dig but I was scouting another old lot and this was just sitting on the surface. Boo-yaka!

Sadly the first bits to come out were screw tops and rusted metal tins, there were also some nice pieces of crocks which are destined to be glued back together some day.  Digging down we were greeted by a ton of bricks and it soon became quite evident that we were in a brick liner,one of the walls had collapsed in…thus all the bricks. I was sure the house was about 1880’s-90’s and was hoping that the age would change as we neared the bottom, at  5 ft  we were still digging the same junk out as we did at the top… no such luck this time. I had given up hope of the pit producing anything of decent age but as you well know you don’t just stop and fill it in, even post 1900 pits can produce some nice keepers (SS cokes, a local mini jug and of course drugstores). I pulled out what I expected to be yet another slick but it turned out to be a local druggist that I had never heard of, considering that I have over 30 different local drugstores I’d say that was a pretty cool find. WOO HOO!

I have been probing a bunch recently but Bloomington is not an easy place to dig. There has always been a lot of money in this town and it seems that there has been so much large remodeling done even in older neighborhoods, not only  have peoples back yards changed so much with garage additions etc but whole residential blocks have been leveled to make place for car parks, banks, schools, churches and all manner of grotesque concrete combinations…places which would once have shared their privy goodness with any passing digger now sport super sized concrete pads with super sized buildings on them….  only to prevent a super sized bottle collection. BOO to concrete pads and road pack!

The only decent find of the day!

There were some nice non bottle finds in the 2 pits including my FAVORITE doll’s head  (and every non privy diggers least favorite)  some kind of screw cap Ford thingy, lice comb and 2 pipes

These pictures are my split from both of the digs (minus one of the large school house inks)

The wedge shape bottle is a Willson’s carbolated cod liver oil from Buffalo, NY