Any privy diggers ever seen this before?

[bloodj2]

Well, this is convenient timing. This past weekend, I was out digging with Madman and we came across a privy that was pretty much exactly as you're describing. Two walls of the privy is squared off with white fire bricks about six bricks deep and then it changes to stone. The opposite wall is red brick straight down to the bottom, the other wall was two layers of brick and stone the rest of the way down.

Unfortunately, somebody beat us to it because we dug it to the bottom (only about 5 feet before we hit compact clay) and hit 1970's tires including a still inflated temporary spare [] . Only one bottle came out of it and that was a 1920's whitehouse along with lots of shards of 1858 Ball jars.

Moral of the story don't dig privies with tires in them...heh.

Pictures below:

 

[RICKJJ59W]

ORIGINAL: bloodj2

Well, this is convenient timing. This past weekend, I was out digging with Madman and we came across a privy that was pretty much exactly as you're describing. Two walls of the privy is squared off with white fire bricks about six bricks deep and then it changes to stone. The opposite wall is red brick straight down to the bottom, the other wall was two layers of brick and stone the rest of the way down.

Unfortunately, somebody beat us to it because we dug it to the bottom (only about 5 feet before we hit compact clay) and hit 1970's tires including a still inflated temporary spare [] . Only one bottle came out of it and that was a 1920's whitehouse along with lots of shards of 1858 Ball jars.

Moral of the story don't dig privies with tires in them...heh.

Pictures below:

Don't feel bad once I dug a pit with a sink in it,It was a real sink hole []

 

[mtfdfire22]

They never make things easy on us. We dug a Brick liner here in Saginaw Michigan about 2 months ago. Got to the bottom of the 4 footer and it was morter, cleaned off the walls and they were double wide bricks on 3 walls. The 4th wall was made of boulders that ranged from 50lbs to 200lbs. Nice big 8" clay sewer pipe running through the wall and about 10 bottles total. It gave up 2 nice cone inks, a druggist and some slicks right off the bottom. Another privy turned water closet. what a shame.

 

[baltbottles]

Moral of the story don't dig privies with tires in them...heh

Dug a pretty good pit with tires in the top six feet. I had started digging the pit years before and gave up when I hit the tires. About 6 years ago I herd a story from another digger about a brick liner that they had started behind a certain type of house in a certain part of Baltimore being there are only about 100 houses in that area that matched the general description. Well by time they got down about 6 feet and were finding bottles the home owner changed his mind about them digging and because the pit was very wet they threw in a bunch of tires to make up for the water they took out and dumped down the alley. So lacking a sure thing to dig and since the house had gone abandoned. I got my digging buddy to humor me and go pull the tires out of this pit I had started and see if it was the one the diggers had gotten kicked out of. And well it was the right pit and was pretty good we got a couple Baltimore pontiles and some other cool stuff. This always makes me wonder how many half dug pits are out there...


Chris

 

[twowheelfan]

i know of a half dug pit in Jersey city! got to the top of the trash/use layer and had to fill it in.

 

[mtfdfire22]

i would be stuck always wondering. we had a couple real deep ones that we gave up on that i do not regret for safety reasons but in a 5-12 footer, id be pretty depressed if we had to fill it back in.

 

[madman]

ORIGINAL: baltbottles

Moral of the story don't dig privies with tires in them...heh

Dug a pretty good pit with tires in the top six feet. I had started digging the pit years before and gave up when I hit the tires. About 6 years ago I herd a story from another digger about a brick liner that they had started behind a certain type of house in a certain part of Baltimore being there are only about 100 houses in that area that matched the general description. Well by time they got down about 6 feet and were finding bottles the home owner changed his mind about them digging and because the pit was very wet they threw in a bunch of tires to make up for the water they took out and dumped down the alley. So lacking a sure thing to dig and since the house had gone abandoned. I got my digging buddy to humor me and go pull the tires out of this pit I had started and see if it was the one the diggers had gotten kicked out of. And well it was the right pit and was pretty good we got a couple Baltimore pontiles and some other cool stuff. This always makes me wonder how many half dug pits are out there...


Chris

chris yep ive found in the south early diggers didnt dig deep in some cases the big problem is rock hard clay caps so we gave it a go but it had been dug

 

[RICKJJ59W]

ORIGINAL: mtfdfire22

i would be stuck always wondering. we had a couple real deep ones that we gave up on that i do not regret for safety reasons but in a 5-12 footer, id be pretty depressed if we had to fill it back in.

We never had to fill a pit in before its time,knock on wood liner[]