January 8th 2006

I met Mike in Covington to check out the hole getting dug for this trendy yuppie deal.
 

As you can see, there isn't much ground left outside of the buildings footprint, meaning, they had to haul away all the dirt from the extra deep hole they would be digging. When we got there, the dirt moving was completed, and a nice clean hole awaited us. They had spread a fine crushed gravel over the bottom, to soak up mud and give them a cleaner tromping area. It also effectively hid any ashy spots. The hole, being 20 feet deep, had us thinking we might find the bottom 5 feet of a good old 25 foot deep Covington privy pit. No such. I scratched a black glass ale out of some clumpy slide dirt, and a green bowling pin shaped water right out of a swampy area of the gravel.

We decided to head across the 1865 suspension bridge (see it there) back into Cincy to check out a construction site in the Columbia-Tusculum area. On the way, we saw another construction site looking left off the bridge into the Westside, and headed off in that direction instead.

We hadn't been there a whole minute and Mike walks right into the first 20 feet of dirt, to a puddle in the freshly dozed clay, and sticks in his probe and snaps glass at 3 feet.

Well, there could have been 10 feet of fill with glass in it, but it looked like it was below the natural lay of the land, so we started flinging half-shovels of sticky grey clay.

After a foot of clay was removed we shoveled into black privy soil full of red ware and yellow ware shards. There were many large limestone rocks and some bricks mixed in with the relentless clay, and it made digging a real chore. We opened up the tiny test hole into a slightly larger tiny test hole and weaseled down to the bottom at 4 feet below grade. The top part of this pit had definitely been removed by the equipment. We hit black water at about 3 feet and we were bailing with a small bucket we found on the site. We were able to clean out the bottom without removing too much from the sides. The hole was constricting to say the least, but we were making time.

We had the pit cleaned out in short order. The age was kind of mixed, as we found a couple of potiled bases, along with some clear stuff from 1900. The take was small, with a smooth base J. Born squat soda, a small stemmed pressed glass, a jelly jar, a pontiled puff, a small bromo-seltzer, a French Bro's milk pint, a tavern pipe, and a face trade pipe.

Sure has been a warm week for January. Hope the white death stays away for a little longer !