Dug 6 hutch and lots of broke ones today

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buriedtreasuretime

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BUT, Bulldozers can sometimes make the job of digging for them much easier, They have helped me out alot on Construction Sites. LEON.View attachment 222916

Ain’t that the truth! A lot of my earlier finds were due to grading, I found a privy next to an early China town in the 70’s in Winnemucca Nevada, made obvious by burned embers and ash , broken shards exposed by city grading for a new garage for the fire dept. lots of Chinese pottery, paper thin pumpkin seed flasks , bitters and SAn Francisco whiskeys, opium vials or herbal medicines,1860’s and later. One of my best digs. My Mom spotted it and took me out of my class in high school to dig that. Time of my life. I’m envious of you guys that can still find places to dig.


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east texas terry

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I really commend you on bringing back your shards as well. Do you bring them back for study as the main purpose or is it also a conservation act as well once disturbed in the soil. I commend that act too, leave it better then you found it. And then my third question is, do you recycle the glass bits you bring back( do you have glass recycling there). I’m a sea glass collector and very little of it is found in the us any more due to conservation and laws preventing dumping in the ocean and water ways. It would be great if that could be returned to an ocean to become sea glass. The modern recycled glass is not heavy enough to hold up to the tumbling of the ocean. Up in Fort Bragg next to Mendocino CA was a dump at the ocean edge from the 18880’s up and into the 1950’s. It was burned daily and pushed into the ocean. The tin cans with the salt turned into a metal amalgam with broken glass in twined in it. The decades of salt water licking and tumbling has created “glass beach” I took a weekend at low tide in the 90’s when you could scour the beach for beach glass( the beach was literally 14” deep in broken glass for about 200 feet down the beach. I found a lot of the cobalt beach glass at low tide out some way. It is a state beach now and harvesting the glass is prohibited by the law. It’s about 10 inches deep now but mostly white window glass, all the great colors have been picked out.


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I rake up all the glass up and haul it off. If need to plant grass i will I keep several 5 gallon of top soil in my truck. I show the land the owner what i haul off I do living history show and give away the glass for art project
 

buriedtreasuretime

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I rake up all the glass up and haul it off. If need to plant grass i will I keep several 5 gallon of top soil in my truck. I show the land the owner what i haul off I do living history show and give away the glass for art project

That’s really a great way to preserve the land and recycle through art


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Fenndango

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That clover one looks nice. I've only ever found 5 hutch's total, not including slicks, 4 were the same- Athol MA, 1 was the Empire water from NY.
 

nhpharm

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Awesome finds! Some nice small town Texas hutch sodas there!
 

willong

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I rake up all the glass up and haul it off. If need to plant grass i will I keep several 5 gallon of top soil in my truck. I show the land the owner what i haul off I do living history show and give away the glass for art project

Kudos on your ethical practices. I've never been a privy pit digger myself because I'm not cut out to knock on doors seeking permission to dig. However, I have often cringed when viewing privy digger videos to see the diggers shoveling great piles of glass and pottery shards back into the hole. It would take little additional effort during the dig to sift all the material taken from a pit, which would retrieve small items like marbles and coins in the process, then return nothing but the screened soil to the pit. Also, if tamped lightly, screened soil will refill the hole more effectively, with less subsequent settling, than a mix that includes large curved shards of hard material.

Since the majority of my digs in the early 1970's were in rural wooded locations and comprised mostly surface dumps, including some that were extensive scatters of crumbling tin cans and other debris, I don't feel too guilty about my youthful and less considered attitude at the time. Indeed, at least one of the sites that I dug has since been made into a public trail and park with interpretive signs that tell of the late 19th century railroad and logging activities which took place there. Conceivably, some items I left behind now add to hikers' experience of "olden times." I do wish though, that I had carted off at least one each of the innumerable old relic saws, both circular "head rigs" and the two-man crosscuts that had been discarded all along, and still littered, the banks of the RR grade when I visited in 1971.

Too, I have often regretted not keeping more glass shards. With the idea of incorporating the pieces into such craft projects as epoxy table tops with embedded shards of recognizable embossed brands of bitters, whiskey and other bottles, I did start saving some of my more interesting pieces later on. I love what you are doing in donating pieces to artists and crafts people. I hope more bottle diggers adopt your practices.
 

4oregonz

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I really commend you on bringing back your shards as well. Do you bring them back for study as the main purpose or is it also a conservation act as well once disturbed in the soil. I commend that act too, leave it better then you found it. And then my third question is, do you recycle the glass bits you bring back( do you have glass recycling there). I’m a sea glass collector and very little of it is found in the us any more due to conservation and laws preventing dumping in the ocean and water ways. It would be great if that could be returned to an ocean to become sea glass. The modern recycled glass is not heavy enough to hold up to the tumbling of the ocean. Up in Fort Bragg next to Mendocino CA was a dump at the ocean edge from the 18880’s up and into the 1950’s. It was burned daily and pushed into the ocean. The tin cans with the salt turned into a metal amalgam with broken glass in twined in it. The decades of salt water licking and tumbling has created “glass beach” I took a weekend at low tide in the 90’s when you could scour the beach for beach glass( the beach was literally 14” deep in broken glass for about 200 feet down the beach. I found a lot of the cobalt beach glass at low tide out some way. It is a state beach now and harvesting the glass is prohibited by the law. It’s about 10 inches deep now but mostly white window glass, all the great colors have been picked out.


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Many people in search of "SeaGlass" at Glass Beach, do not realize it was a dump!!
 

Len

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As always, interesting comments there Buriedtreasuretime. I guess making it a state park with a prohibition on gathering is like killing two birds with one stone. Very cool and great for humans but I wonder about the glass' effect on the sealife?... --Len,CT
 

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