Privy
Dig Sunday, May 21, 2006
I first met Paul through the
Yahoo! Group ‘Ohio privy diggers.’ He and his son, Zack, were dump
diggers and wanted to learn about privy digging. After some
conversation he invited me to his town for a possible dig. Our
first time out ended up being a learning experience that would carry
over for future digs. I, for one, seem to be a magnet to old buried
trash pits. I truly believe I hit more trash pits in a season than
I do privies. It must be my Polish heritage rearing it’s ugly
head. Keeping this in mind I decided to get in touch with a fellow
digger and friend of mine. It must have been the Roman privy God,
Pooperonius Crappamus, looking down on me when I made the call to
Doug with the invitation to share in the dig because he said “I’m
in!”.
Now Doug is a privy locating
guru. I recall a time last year when I had spent several hours at
my Aunt and Uncle in-law’s 1888 home and could not find the blasted
privy. Doug comes in, spends two minutes and locates it.
Sheesh. The guy is a master.
I have dug with Doug (say
that 3 times real fast) on several occasions and we have never come
away empty handed. So my optimism and excitement were so
overwhelming the night before the dig that I had a hard time
sleeping. Sunday morning arrived with the annoying music of the
alarm clock and I was out of bed faster than an 8 year old on
Christmas morning. I had prepared all of my gear the night before
so I wouldn’t waste time and was ready to go. I was so wound up
about digging that I forgot to kiss my sleeping beauty of a wife
goodbye and had to come back in to do it before my conscience got
the best of me. Now, after making sure my wife was kissed, the dog
let outside to do his own whatever-dogs-do-outside routine, and the
kids fed their cereal and potato chips, I was finally off to a new
digging adventure. As soon as the garage door went up I was met by
a driving rain. What? The forecast said sunny and high 50’s.
Well, my mind was made up and I was still going. With my mind
racing about solutions to the rain problem, I decided to concentrate
on driving and worry about it when we all met up. Thankfully the
rain had lessened and almost dissipated by time I reached the agreed
upon meeting site. Paul and his son, Zack, were already there. We
shot the bull for about twenty minutes and Doug finally arrived. We
threw the gear and ourselves in the van and set out to find our
first privy victim.
The first cold permission
that was attempted turned out to be a no answer at the door. The
second attempt for a permissed site was met by a “You’ll have to ask
the landlord, I’m just a renter.” Third attempt landed us in the
backyard where the owner was out working on a car and drinking a
Miller Genuine Draft. Ok…now this is Sunday around 10 a.m. This
man is dedicated to his beer! Or his beer is dedicated to him.
Maybe he was already half snookered because he gave us permission to
rip through the yard. Doug pulled his trusty probe from its
scabbard strapped to his back and began to stab the ground. Within
a matter of 6 pokes, Doug had found the pit, looked at me and said
“Brick liner”.
We wasted no time in
spreading the tarp and cutting the sod. As we were proceeding with
digging, Doug had ventured off around the yard to try and locate
another privy. We had 4 diggers and one pit. It sure would have
been nice to dig two at one time. Unfortunately, Doug didn’t find
another pit so we concentrated on the one we started. The pit
showed us it was indeed an oval brick liner about 5 foot across and
3 foot wide. The earth was producing shards of glass, metal and
leather shoe soles. We figured from the shards that the layer we
were in was1890’s to turn of the century. Not quite as old as we
wanted but it was sure nice to once again so some backyard
archaeology.
Paul’s turn in the pit
started with some excitement. We weren’t down very deep at all when
all of a sudden I spotted a broken bottom half of what seemed to be
a puff. I yell to Paul to get it, he grabs it, says it’s a pontil
and gives it to me. Holy cow!! A pontil at only 3 feet. Maybe this
goes older than the 1890’s we originally thought. All of a sudden I
looked at Doug who was looking at Zack, who was looking at his Dad,
Paul and all were wearing a hellacious grin on their faces. All of
them were laughing to the point of accidentally excreting bodily
fluid. Then it dawned on me that while my attention was focused on
Paul’s digging, Doug had thrown the base, unbeknownst to me, into
the pit to get me all excited! Ha ha. After the excitement of my
vulgar, curse strewn rebuttal to Doug’s joke died down he hopped in
the pit, still chuckling, for his turn to throw some dirt.
Looks like they’re
still laughing about the joke. From left to right: Paul, Zack, &
Doug
Doug had started to pull out
some embossed druggists, some wines with kick-up bases and a slug
plated ale. My turn in the pit left me with Zack as a bucket
puller. I’d asked where Doug and Paul went and he said they were
off to a neighbor’s house to probe. That’s a cool thing about
digging…neighbors get nosy and want to know what you are finding.
They then start wondering what might be in their backyard and the
permission is easily obtained. So as they are off probing potential
privies to plunder, I start pulling out embossed hutches. Cool! I
had pulled out 5 identical ones when Zack, who was experiencing his
first privy dig, couldn’t take it anymore. He used the most
authoritative 16-year-old voice he could muster and ordered me out
of the pit. I happily handed over the potato rake since he is a
ranked high school wrestler and could probably have physically
removed me from the bottle graveyard I was in.
Zack had settled in and was
slinging dirt like crazy when Doug and Paul returned. Doug looked a
bit grim as I asked him how the probing went. He had found two
privies but they had the feel that they had already been plundered
by other diggers. Darn! This pit yielded a couple more 1890’s era
bottles and a nice bitters. We hit bottom, scraped around, got some
more un-embossed druggists and filled it in.
I won’t waste time about
non-important things like driving around looking for houses, I’m
just gonna skip on to the next fully dug pit.
We skillfully, masterfully,
and tactfully conned our way into a backyard for some throwin’ of
the dirt. Once again, Doug had found the pit early on and we spread
the tarps. I need to mention that Doug had also found the 2nd
pit but we weren’t able to dig it due to time constraints. We soon
found this pit to be a woody full of gravelly ash. Shards were
poking up here and there but nothing too neat until we got close to
the bottom. As I was standing on top of the hole looking down on
Doug, I hear him say “Squat Soda”! Woo Hoo!! He pulled up a nice
City Bottling Works, Cincinnati, OH agua colored squat. Several
more ended up coming out along with a stoneware master ink, a
stoneware sided beer with a blue transfer-ware X on the neck,
several local embossed meds and slicks. All in all it wasn’t a bad
pit. We got some nice keepers and had a lot of fun.
