Question when looking for creeks or small rivers to walk should they be near or in a town or city or would any random creek hold bottles? Because there are numerous creeks around but no significant "big town or city" closet would be 40min away
Going to piggyback off CanadianBottles here with a bit of my experience as I tend to prefer walking rivers over digging. I've had most of my luck just downstream of villages in my area (Maine), not necessarily near the cities or larger towns. These places had maybe 20-40 families living in them during their height around 1850-1910, mostly centered around a mill or tannery. Generally trash was dumped downstream from the village so to keep a potable source of water. Old maps will be your best resource - even if its one or two old house foundations in the woods, they had to dump their trash somewhere!Any creek which had people living on its banks in the 19th century can have bottles. Urban areas of course will have a lot more bottles but they also generally have more people looking for bottles. In rural areas you're more likely to have been the first person to look for bottles there, at least in quite a while. If there's a small town on the banks of the creek then your chances of finding something good will increase quite a bit. "Small" is a relative term as well, a place with a couple thousand people living in it today wouldn't be considered a big town by any means but in the 19th century that would be large enough to be a place where plenty of bottles were dumped.
I have found here in Massachusetts that you can often purchase for small money copies of maps from the 1700s and 1800s showing where people had homes in those days. Sometimes the maps will show you where roads no longer exist from those time periods. The homes have long vanished but partial foundations or outhouses and dump sites can still be located. Keep your eyes open for stone walls. Farmers would often throw their trash on the other side of the stone wall, out of site..out of mind. But far often the dump site would be in the streams and creeks. Bill Rose Little Rhody Bottle ClubQuestion when looking for creeks or small rivers to walk should they be near or in a town or city or would any random creek hold bottles? Because there are numerous creeks around but no significant "big town or city" closet would be 40min away