Robby Raccoon
Trash Digger
But, dang! It took a long time just to find a single porcelain one! It's the same building where I dug 'my first blob' and oldest dug coin, and I have finally dug my first porcelain stopper! [
]Sadly, it is severely damaged. []Nonetheless, I come with another story to offer to you all: Leaving the house around noon (no college today,) I hit the road on my mom's bike (as mine is still ruined) and run into trouble 1/3rd of the way to my dig-site: My handlebars break. []So what do I do as they are still attached but fall down and point at the ground? Well, I keep riding-- as long as the bike is rideable, it'll be ridden. Still, it's not fun as they move with the contours and bumps on the road and sidewalk, and they move more than my arms. Eventually, I make it to the building, pull into teh gravel lot, walk it into the trees and vines, and lock my bike up where I always do. Instead of taking the long, oftentimes pitch-black route through the building of bricked-up/boarded-up windows and cavernous rooms flooded in mud and covered in debris, I go around to where the last time I came out: A collapsed wall facing the modern bakery that covers the site of Muskegon Brewing Co. I quietly walk along the fence-and-barbed-wire (who needs barbed wire at a bakery) gravel drive with its usually-open electric gates 8 feet high (was it the bakery that put in such security measures?) and spot a semi-truck sitting in idle. I walk close to the 1800s building that is overgrown with vines and trees and am glad to see that the semi may be on but is not occupied. So I walk through some trees and vines, around a 10-foot drop, and into hole where once a wall stood. Within a minute, I'm in the room that I need and start digging, but an hour later.... I hear something that I REALLY don't want to hear in there: Footsteps crunching on debris very close to the thankfully-obscured doorway that gives entrance into a dark graveyard of a room (there seem to be more dead animals in there every time I show up.) I stop digging, turn my flashlight off as the slobber from holding it in my mouth drips off of it, and I hide behind a column I'd later dig around.Staring at my pack, I wonder if the light from the brightly-lit room outside of the dark hole I'm in would somehow reveal it to anyone looking? Would they come down the short, rickety, debris-strewn stairwell into what must look like the epitome of an uninviting place? Would they for some reason inadvertently lock me in the brick room with its 2-inch-thick oak door and heavy lock? What are the person's intentions as their shoes crunch on broken brick and shattered glass strewn across the building's cracked cement floor? Is he homeless? Police? Urban explorer?I sit there, staring at the doorway, in darkness with my shovel leaning against the column holding up the second-floor of the tri-level building. I hear what sounds like intentionally quiet footsteps leaving-- likely the near stairway that goes down to the basement-level which has the main entrance-- and I sit there a few more minutes, later getting a thick wire laying in the dirt and quietly probe the ground around me for glass as I listen intently for any return or anyone else up there. I then begin to quietly dig as the only sounds are of semi-trucks entering/leaving the bakery and the sounds of a wrecked building slowly deteriorating after standing the tests of time in Michigan for over a century. I dig two trenches following along my first trench, overlapping just a little bit in search of items. I find much, but all is broken. I even spot what looks like a nickle, but it is not. Nearly giving up on one part of a trench, my mind shouts "Woah, woah, woah, woah, wait a minute!" as my shovel's decent into the hard-packed dirt halts abruptly. Why halt so excitedly? Well, a bright white circle greets the shine of my powerful mini-light held in my mouth. My eyes behold my first porcelain stopper! I pull it out from about a foot down and am happy to see that it is a two-tone Muskegon Brewing Co. stopper but am sad to see that it is damaged!
"MUSKEGON BREWING CO. / PURE / AND / WITHOUT DRUGS / OR / POISONS / MUSKEGON, MICH." The 'Pure and Without...' tells me that it is post-1898 albeit the bottom says 1895 patent date.
"DREYFUSS BOTTLE & STOPPER CO" is what part of it says, but going around the circle like it does, the next part of "N.Y." is technically upside down.It also says "PAT'D / OCT 15 / 1895" on it.It can stand on either end and is very broad and very flat all over save for the sides. I keep digging my way to the wall facing the former Muskegon Brewery when suddenly out pops the shard to the mouth of a stoneware beer. I dig down a bit more and find another shard! But wait, is it actually debossed? Well I'll be darned, it's even local. I've seen this one in a very prominent collection.
I dig all around, down into the clay and mud, and scrape the wall but find nothing more of it. [:'(]Where are the rest of the pieces to everything? [>:]Like, seriously: Around the stopper for like a foot, it was clear of any shards of size greater than a quarter. Where's the bottle that went with it?
S. C. Chumard was very prominent in his day, but I've seen only one of his stoneware bottles. The place makes sense only if it was the site of dumping bottles from other parts of the factory, or if it had been used to store illegal alcohol during Prohibition-- and was likely caught, everything in it shattered, and the room mostly cleaned out. Had the number of pre-1906 bottles been lower, the storage idea would be more logical. So, I can only conclude that this was the dump for workers from the factory/Brewery (I believe that the Brewery owned the building early on.) To go back a bit, this was one of my first finds from today:
It's very small-- compared to my massive paws, its down-right tiny. Possibly a child's shoe? If so, this child likely worked in the factory or brewery before Prohibition hit. A sign of child labor? Who knows, but this shoe hold's someone's story of day-to-day life. That is why I brought it back. I find it interesting on how it was made.I've dug other shoes made of leather, cork, and rubber, but this is the oldest I've found. Before I left, I dug around the farthest-back support-column holding up the ceiling of holes and decaying materials. I found almost 1 whole bottle in several pieces, a broken cup that would have been gorgeous, and this broken hen's head:
What was this milk-glass item from? Today's "take."
]Sadly, it is severely damaged. []Nonetheless, I come with another story to offer to you all: Leaving the house around noon (no college today,) I hit the road on my mom's bike (as mine is still ruined) and run into trouble 1/3rd of the way to my dig-site: My handlebars break. []So what do I do as they are still attached but fall down and point at the ground? Well, I keep riding-- as long as the bike is rideable, it'll be ridden. Still, it's not fun as they move with the contours and bumps on the road and sidewalk, and they move more than my arms. Eventually, I make it to the building, pull into teh gravel lot, walk it into the trees and vines, and lock my bike up where I always do. Instead of taking the long, oftentimes pitch-black route through the building of bricked-up/boarded-up windows and cavernous rooms flooded in mud and covered in debris, I go around to where the last time I came out: A collapsed wall facing the modern bakery that covers the site of Muskegon Brewing Co. I quietly walk along the fence-and-barbed-wire (who needs barbed wire at a bakery) gravel drive with its usually-open electric gates 8 feet high (was it the bakery that put in such security measures?) and spot a semi-truck sitting in idle. I walk close to the 1800s building that is overgrown with vines and trees and am glad to see that the semi may be on but is not occupied. So I walk through some trees and vines, around a 10-foot drop, and into hole where once a wall stood. Within a minute, I'm in the room that I need and start digging, but an hour later.... I hear something that I REALLY don't want to hear in there: Footsteps crunching on debris very close to the thankfully-obscured doorway that gives entrance into a dark graveyard of a room (there seem to be more dead animals in there every time I show up.) I stop digging, turn my flashlight off as the slobber from holding it in my mouth drips off of it, and I hide behind a column I'd later dig around.Staring at my pack, I wonder if the light from the brightly-lit room outside of the dark hole I'm in would somehow reveal it to anyone looking? Would they come down the short, rickety, debris-strewn stairwell into what must look like the epitome of an uninviting place? Would they for some reason inadvertently lock me in the brick room with its 2-inch-thick oak door and heavy lock? What are the person's intentions as their shoes crunch on broken brick and shattered glass strewn across the building's cracked cement floor? Is he homeless? Police? Urban explorer?I sit there, staring at the doorway, in darkness with my shovel leaning against the column holding up the second-floor of the tri-level building. I hear what sounds like intentionally quiet footsteps leaving-- likely the near stairway that goes down to the basement-level which has the main entrance-- and I sit there a few more minutes, later getting a thick wire laying in the dirt and quietly probe the ground around me for glass as I listen intently for any return or anyone else up there. I then begin to quietly dig as the only sounds are of semi-trucks entering/leaving the bakery and the sounds of a wrecked building slowly deteriorating after standing the tests of time in Michigan for over a century. I dig two trenches following along my first trench, overlapping just a little bit in search of items. I find much, but all is broken. I even spot what looks like a nickle, but it is not. Nearly giving up on one part of a trench, my mind shouts "Woah, woah, woah, woah, wait a minute!" as my shovel's decent into the hard-packed dirt halts abruptly. Why halt so excitedly? Well, a bright white circle greets the shine of my powerful mini-light held in my mouth. My eyes behold my first porcelain stopper! I pull it out from about a foot down and am happy to see that it is a two-tone Muskegon Brewing Co. stopper but am sad to see that it is damaged!
