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Friday, April 1st 2005
Two April Fools.
This morning, as I was making ready to hit the sack again for an hour or so, after putting the boy on the bus, the phone rang and partner Rod was all up in my ear like, "Man I'm spazzin' and I wanna go dig that pit you comin' or not". And I was all like, "Yo man, I'm tryin' to sneak some winks in here Bro, what's the big rush"? And he was all, "I just gotta get out, and I mean NOW"! So I was like, "Hell yeah then, who you think your talkin' to here, you know I'm down"! I loaded my digging stuff into my work van. Oh yeah..., WORK! THAT'S what I was supposed to do today. I was just planning to wait until the temps went up enough so my paint wouldn't freeze on contact with the exterior wood trim on the house I'm painting. Oh well..., work would have to wait. Being self employed has it's advantages, one of which is deciding which utility should get turned off because the self chooses to ignore the employment and go have fun. So who needs electric anyways !!! Besides...isn't April Fools day meant for foolish things ? Digging out the contents of an old CRAP PIT seemed foolish enough to fit the occasion, so off I went. I met Rod at the dig. This is the spot where Rod had jabbed up a pit on an un-permissed property during last weekends futile shenanigans. We wound up knowing the owners son in-law so Rod called him in Florida and got the official go-head. We threw down blue and started flingin' dirt. We found 2 stone walls and dug them out to the corner. We opened the pit up to a workable size. At three feet deep the stone walls ended on top of clay. Weird ! Under a few more inches of dirt we found the top of another stone wall running right through the middle of our pit. We followed the new wall and found another corner. Seems someone had put a pit over a pit and had it off by about half. We figured the under-pit would be older so we "scootched" the hole over some.
We removed one of the upper walls in the process and finally had three stone walls showing on the pit underneath. Down we went. The digging was smooth and soft. We really didn't see much sign in the way of shards until we were about 7 feet deep. The fill turned ashey and then seeds and black dirt started coming up on the tip of the shovel. Glass was also mixed in. The first few bottles I found were unembossed ammonia types. A couple of older polish bottles, one a Bixby, came out. Then I had a large bottle gleam out of the dirt with an amber shine. Pulling it free by the neck was easy in the soft seedy layer, and I turned it and wiped it to find a quart blob top Christian Morlein / Cincinnati beer. Under it was another blobish top, 0nly in aqua. I peeled it free from it's priverly rest to reveal an A.G. Gilligan Hutchinson soda with the Eagle embossed on the back. Shweet !!! There were several quart and half gallon size fruit jars in the layer, all broken. One of the half gallons came out embossed with the word "Union" with a shield over the embossing.
Another broken fruit jar said "Haines' 1 Improved March 1st 1870". We also found the lid for this jar with the pat. date, and it is intact.
The pit really never got any older than about 1880. We got a few more bottles, mostly pharmacy types, and some embossed. One neat little bottle was embossed as "Bengal Bluing". I found the biggest applied top I have ever seen, probably from a 5 gallon water bottle. The bottom foot of the pit became more clayish in nature and was stuffed completely with broken ironstone plates. The last bottle found was broken, and was a McLean's Strengthening Cordial.
I dug all nine feet of this pit myself, while Rod drug the bucket up the wall from a lawnchair perched on the edge of the pit. He actually left his lawn chair home, so he "borrowed" one from the back porch of the house we were digging.
Sir Rodney,
Duke of Lawnchairshire, rides again.
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