# lets hear some michigan digging stories



## mtfdfire22 (Jan 14, 2013)

Ive been digging in Michigan since i was a kid. Now 25 I can drive to anywhere I want to go. I dont know what its like everywhere else but here we have 3 dying big cities within 60 miles of one another and it makes it very easy to find good spots, as long as you dont mind the gang ridden neighborhoods of downtown Saginaw, Flint and Detroit. 

 Who has dug in Michigan and how were your results? You can dig in just about any city in michigan and find a bottle from Detroit, right next to a bottle from New york, Canada, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and just about anywhere else you can think of in the U.S.

 The only reason i can find for that is the extensive railroad system which came through here very early dumping off things from all over the country on its way through. These are not always common bottles you find from big cities either. These can be local druggists from 750 miles away. Is it like that everywhere??? A good example is digging a quart beer bottle from a tiny little town in Wisconsin which no one from Wisconsin has dug before. 

 Anyway......id like to hear some other digging stories from Michigan to see if we all have the same sort of results. I will pipe back in later to share my own but thought id get the ball rolling here to appease my own curiosity. 

 nic


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## madman (Jan 14, 2013)

ive dug in blissfield mich but mostly in toledo o with pretty good results theres tons of vacant lots in toledo you might check it out sometime


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## yaledigger (Jan 14, 2013)

i am relativley new to digging (less than 2 years).  treasurehunt tom got me hooked and i haven't looked back !
 i live in the country about 60 mile north of Detroit.  i search all over the place up here for farm dumps and old city dumps.  i haven't had too much luck finding anything real old, but, i love getting out and exploring.


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## mctaggart67 (Jan 14, 2013)

Here's a Michigan digging story, sort of. I grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, right across the St. Clair River from Port Huron, Michigan. As one might expect, bottles from each of these places have been carried across the border since the earliest settlements.

 In the 1980s, my best buddy, Doug, and I got a chance to dig in Sarnia's municipal dump. This dump was begun in the late 1870s to fill up a swamp. Judging by what we found in the dump's top layer, the dump was used until the late 1910s. Although once swampland, the dumpsite is now under two blocks' worth of residential neighbourhood. Anyhow, every now and again, Doug and I would get a chance to dig in this great old treasure pit when a homeowner tore down an existing house to rebuild. Let me tell you, it was always a treat, especially since Ontario law at the time (and still does) required that house foundations had to be dug down to natural soil. This meant that we'd get stuff dating from about 1875 to 1920 every time! This explains why we both had hundreds of different local variants in our collections. The only thing that bothers me about our digging exploits is that we didn't have cell phones back then to photographically document matters.

 Naturally, most of what we retrieved was from Ontario and Sarnia, in particular. However, we got the occasional drugstore bottle from Port Huron. Port Huron pharmacy names which come to mind are Knill's and Sylvester's. We also got the odd soda and beer and early ABM milk from Port Huron and even Detroit. We would sell these to a man, whose name I forget, who ran a bottle-friendly antique store west of Port Huron on the Keewhadin (spelling?) Road. In the late spring of 1986 Doug and I hit a motherload of Port Huron beers in the Sarnia dump. These bottles came from the C. Kern Brewing Company, were all pints, had a nice bluish aqua tinge, and were BIM or early ABM. By motherload, I mean motherload. We hauled around 60-50 of the fellows out of one spot. They weren't stacked, as some beer/soda bottle caches are, but they were closely arranged next to each other in a reasonably orderly pattern in the ground. I rather suspect that they'd been thrown out and buried in boxes or crates, which had long since rotted away before we liberated the bottles. Doug and I each kept the best examples and sold the rest off. However, neither of has the specimens we kept, having sold them off, too.

 Naturally, finding Kern beer bottles in the Sarnia dump was not that unusual. Every now and then we'd snag an example from the dump, indicating the occasional crossborder drinking trip back in the early twentieth century. But finding a whole stash of the bottles, gave us pause for thought. A few years later, I'm pretty sure I found my explanation. Shortly after Sarnia's Union Brewing Co. closed its doors in the very early 1910s, Port Huron's C. Kern Brewing Co. opened up a sales agency across the St. Clair in neighbouring Sarnia. Newspaper adverts for the agency show a labelled long-neck bottle which was also embossed exactly as the ones that constituted our score.

 So there you have it -- a Michigan digging story, but one that has been transplanted just a few miles outside the borders of the Great Lakes State.


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## druggistnut (Jan 16, 2013)

Tom (treasurehunt) and I were digging a Sanitarium site in Mid-Michigan. We were chasing a trash layer and hit a woodchuck tunnel. We went a few more feet and there was a Y in the tunnel. This funny Woodie kept sticking his head out one hole, then the other, eyeballing us. Those things are cuter than a bug. Anyway, we ended up reconstructing his tunnel as best we could and left him to his own devices. It was fortuitous, as we left that spot, went around the trees and probed one of our best pits, ever. 
 Thanks, Woodfield.
 Bill


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## mtfdfire22 (Jan 17, 2013)

I wanna get back into that site. I know their has got to be at least 2 more privies there and that many again on the next corner across the street


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## madman (Jan 17, 2013)

what the deal on detroit 95 thousand abandoned houses to new? to scary?


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## epackage (Jan 17, 2013)

There's bottles to be had that aren't from Paterson NJ?!?!?!?


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## mtfdfire22 (Jan 18, 2013)

oh yes sir. smaller lumbering towns like Bay City and Saginaw Michigan are preferred actually. []

 id take a 1 of a kind Saginaw or Bay city beer over anything......including a puce Eagle. Sorry Rick


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## hemihampton (Jan 18, 2013)

> ORIGINAL: madman
> 
> what the deal on detroit 95 thousand abandoned houses to new? to scary?


 

 I've been poking around Detroit but have not found much yet. LEON.


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## druggistnut (Jan 19, 2013)

Tom,
 You should copy and paste Mike's info on that bottle on here. Most people have never seen or heard of it.
 It's a super find.
 Bill


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## CanYouDigIt! (Jan 19, 2013)

What a great find!  Never seen that one before. This bottle definitely has a Canadian connection not too far away in Chatham Ontario.


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## hemihampton (Jan 19, 2013)

The Canadian Clark bros looks similar with the Wheels with wings. LEON.


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## madman (Jan 19, 2013)

awsome stoneys guys!


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## mctaggart67 (Jan 19, 2013)

Fielder was also in Toronto. He may have had connections to Clark Brothers there. Clark Brothers were the first to have the winged wheel trademark. I've heard two things about their inspiration for the design. One, the Clarks had been involved in the cartage/livery business before getting into making soda water. Two, the Clarks were also active participants in bicycle racing. No matter, cool bottles all around. When the Skydome (Rogers Centre) was built in Toronto in the 1980s, hundreds of Clark Bros. hutches came out of the diggings. People were giving them away, though you could sell 'em to bottle collecting Red Wings fans, for obvious reasons. We also hit a small stash of Clark hutches in the same Sarnia, Ontario dump from which we dug up all those Port Huron beers referred to earlier.


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## mctaggart67 (Jan 19, 2013)

By the way, G.J. Fielder's surname is spelled as Fielder and as Fiedler, both on bottles and in historical records. It's a mystery as to the correct spelling.


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## hemihampton (Jan 20, 2013)

My A.R Andrews hole in Detroit. LEON.


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## myersdiggers1998 (Jan 20, 2013)

Any ginger beer dug is a good one in my book.


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## hunting262 (Jan 21, 2013)

> ORIGINAL:  hemihampton
> 
> The Canadian Clark bros looks similar with the Wheels with wings. LEON.


 Hey it says Clark


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## ironmountain (Jan 21, 2013)

not much goodness digging yet...only been at it a few years...mostly an MDer.... been digging wife's family farm dumps.  Many local (u.p.) sodas and milks and food jars.  Started a cpl spots recently up there but weather went from 40 and lightly snowy on the ground to -20 with windchill. 

 As far as Iron Mountain area goes. Just the old Sagola hotel from late 1800's.  Few newer bottles for the few times we've been there. Going there to dig the creek (3" water, 1+ ' of muck) that should be frozen or solid now. Elderly guy that owns the property said that when the foliage is down the creek and swamp area is bottle city. 

 All of the city dumps here have been capped and are now grass/trees.

 I know quite a few places back home (Grand Rapids is my hometown) that'd be good to dig. Haven't been home in a few years.


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## tftfan (Jan 21, 2013)

Back at it SOON......   we hope.  []


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