Last Night Under the Deck

[sodetraveler]

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!

[gleaner1]

Nice spread of digs right there...

[PikesPeakCharlie]

[Colonel Ken]

Brah - sweet finds Seems slow here on Oahu. I did see a guy list a broken AW Hobson Hilo that he says he just found. Keep digging!

Aloha,
COLKEN

[sodetraveler]

Brah - sweet finds Seems slow here on Oahu. I did see a guy list a broken AW Hobson Hilo that he says he just found. Keep digging!

Aloha,
COLKEN

Mahalo Ken!

I considered posting this up on the Hawaii forum, but was kind of embarrassed cause I didn't pull any sodes or other Hawaiian BIMALs during my Hilo visit

You've given me some encouragement to post em anyway! Well, at least the Hawaii finds.......

[jgas]

Any Pontil find is a great day for sure. Looks like some very nice finds. Keep it going. Sometimes you hope the pits never end!! Congrats jgas