tigue710
Well-Known Member
Got back in to my subterranean excavation today, and finally made the jump to a new section I've been really wanting to dig. There is no access to this are because it is cut off from the rest of the crawl space by a large concrete knee wall that spans the length of building. I though about digging under since the knee wall only supports the floor joists and no load, (its way over kill where a simple beam would of sufficed but actually nothing is needed at all), but abandon the idea because of the amount of work it would take. I checked the floor joists until i could find two spaced far enough apart I could squeeze through. These are 2x12's spaced 16 on center, so its a little harry to try and squeeze through them, if you panic your gonna get stuck! Once I found the right spot I passed my tools and my light through, cleaned out the cobwebs and crawled through the dark, just barely squeezing out to my light on the other side! Greeting me was a beautiful thing, a scenery untouched since the building was built in 1903. Among the construction and demolition debris scattered everywhere I find bits of old shoes, some rusty cans and even a few wooden boxes from the turn of the century. I had tried to drop myself down close to where the back wall of an 1850's brick building had sat, and digging down I immediately hit a large piece of slate, the top of the foundation wall from the Gold Rush era building! Digging beside the wall on what was the outside I didn't like my test pit so I jumped over and started down on the inside. Almost right away I see some glass, and as my eyes focus on the bottle and realize what it is I just about shout out load, it's a pontiled cobalt blue cone ink, just like the one I dug last year! I get it out and flip it around only to find its chipped in the lip and not perfect, bummer! You cant win them all. In the ash around the ink, which is likely from a fire in the 1850's which burnt the town I notice some little pellets, I start picking them out and about a half hour later I've got the ink stuffed with glass trade beads and I haven't even touched the layer! I ended up digging it out and bagging it for sifting at home because I'm anxious to get back to bottle digging! Moving deeper and along the foundation wall I hit a some black glass, and then some more and more, and more, its all smashed but its so thick I couldn't even call it digging more like picking... I didn't get anything whole but it was all wines, champagnes and ale bottles, and nothing really interesting. Right above this layer are a few consecutive layers of dirt and ash and in the lower ash layer I quickly hit another bottle, looks like a soda? A nice IP Lancaster Glass Works with backwards N's, and its perfect! Right after that I find a nice OP embossed Wells, Miller And Provost pepper sauce, but it has a chip in the base and the lip. I end up digging a trench about 6 feet long and 2 feet wide about a foot and half deep, and I think there might be more...