sodetraveler
Sr. Member
After nearly a year of digging around in my backyard I think I finally located the 1860's trash pit I've been looking for 
The ground behind my place is extremely rocky, so probing doesn't work well. I figured that the only way to find the bottles was to DIG IT ALL!!!
Well, after a pretty good start with a decent number of bottles, my luck turned sour. For the last 2 months - despite digging every week - I haven't found anything
Sunday afternoon was looking to be more of the same. After a couple hours of fruitless digging I decided to take a walk around to see if the recent rains had unearthed anything.
I saw an aqua colored shard sticking out and gave it a kick with my boot. It turned out to be about 3/4th of an R.R.R. Radway. It was right under my back deck, but I figured why not dig a test hole anyway?
Soon enough I was hitting lots of broken china and right under it I found a cool "true" 4-piece mold, applied lip medicine bottle. It's unembossed, but I'd never seen a 4-piece mold with the seam line going right accross the middle of the base before. I had run out of time, but decided to come back after work on Monday to see what else was there.
Monday evening I got an early start and proceeded to dig a deeper hole starting down-slope and moving up to were I found the med. Didn't find anything lower down the hill, but as soon as I got to the spot where the med was I started to hit rust, china shards, bones and glass. This was it, I had finally found the trash pit!
I soon unearthed a J.W.Hunnewell. I had seen many food bottles with this shape, but never an embossed one
No sooner had I stashed it in my pack than I uncovered the base of my very first intact punty boy! It's probably a common bottle, but having spent my whole bottle digging career in turn-of-the-century dumps it was pure gold to me
I had to quite after that, but I'm going to dig even deeper tonight!
Here are some pictures I took plus some pictures of the bottles I found last week in Hilo, Hawaii. While visiting my mom I got permission to dig in the neighbor's yard. Got some nice 1880's gins and some other 1890's stuff. Thought you might like to see!
The ground behind my place is extremely rocky, so probing doesn't work well. I figured that the only way to find the bottles was to DIG IT ALL!!!
Well, after a pretty good start with a decent number of bottles, my luck turned sour. For the last 2 months - despite digging every week - I haven't found anything
Sunday afternoon was looking to be more of the same. After a couple hours of fruitless digging I decided to take a walk around to see if the recent rains had unearthed anything.
I saw an aqua colored shard sticking out and gave it a kick with my boot. It turned out to be about 3/4th of an R.R.R. Radway. It was right under my back deck, but I figured why not dig a test hole anyway?
Soon enough I was hitting lots of broken china and right under it I found a cool "true" 4-piece mold, applied lip medicine bottle. It's unembossed, but I'd never seen a 4-piece mold with the seam line going right accross the middle of the base before. I had run out of time, but decided to come back after work on Monday to see what else was there.
Monday evening I got an early start and proceeded to dig a deeper hole starting down-slope and moving up to were I found the med. Didn't find anything lower down the hill, but as soon as I got to the spot where the med was I started to hit rust, china shards, bones and glass. This was it, I had finally found the trash pit!
I soon unearthed a J.W.Hunnewell. I had seen many food bottles with this shape, but never an embossed one
No sooner had I stashed it in my pack than I uncovered the base of my very first intact punty boy! It's probably a common bottle, but having spent my whole bottle digging career in turn-of-the-century dumps it was pure gold to me
I had to quite after that, but I'm going to dig even deeper tonight!
Here are some pictures I took plus some pictures of the bottles I found last week in Hilo, Hawaii. While visiting my mom I got permission to dig in the neighbor's yard. Got some nice 1880's gins and some other 1890's stuff. Thought you might like to see!
jgas
