Question for you privy diggers

[kastoo]

I was pretty excited to be there with DiggerRL. It's a pretty exciting opportunity. I will not get tired of digging it. Something is there, shoot, if I had the time that day I would have happily plowed through all that ash and dark dirt just for the hope of finding something. For me it's really not the bottles, it's the bragging rights to saying I dug there and we found the bottles. Pictures of us holding up the dirty fresh dug bottles..that's good enough for me! Thanks RL!

 

[druggistnut]

Some very sound advice. I'd sure listen to anything Andy and Chris have to say about digging in cities, they are both guys I have always wanted to dig with.

I have an add-on to Chris's advice. If the buildings have crawl spaces under any of them, I'd get in there and look for the depressions. If you find any earlier map, and it reflects the earlier, smaller buildings, then I would also say that the pits are under the newer buildings.
Bill

 

[DiggerRL]

Thanks so much for all the advice guys, we will keep looking.

 

[willong]

Hey Ron,

Privys aren't the only place people disposed of bottles. I would expand upon Bill's crawl space comment, and say that you might well find pristine bottles lying on top of the ground in a crawl space. I found several antique bottles under buildings in Port Angeles when I first moved there. I have several three-piece-mold "slicks" from under one building that still have decent paper labels on them--Teacher's Highland Cream, a blended scotch wisky brand that is still produced today. Also, assuming those railroad tracks are built up on a ballasted bed, and particularly if the railroad is significantly higher than the surrounding grade, I'd at least dig some test holes on either side of the roadbed. Depending on what part of the country you are in, what the native ground was, and how far away the builders had to go for good ballast rock, the roadbed might well have been built up with native soil first. If they did that, then it is likely that the tracks were once paralleled by shallow drainage ditches, which were convenient and popular dumping grounds in some nineteenth century towns, particularly in western frontier areas. (Look at a few historical photographs of frontier towns, and it shouldn't take too long before you'll spot cans, bottles, boards from crates, hoops from busted barrels, and similar junk lying in just about any depression or over any embankment in view.) If a probe won't go in, you could sink a few holes with a posthole digger just to see if there is any rubbish down there. Sure, you might break a bottle, but you might also locate an extensive strip dump that could run along the tracks for hundreds of feet. Try from about six feet out to ten or twelve feet from the ends of the ties. Good luck man.

Will