Friday, May 26, 2023

Buried Treasure

 (I wrote this on the day of the dig. It was back in 2006.)

Two nice young men from the historical society came by today with probes and shovels, a pail and some rope. They had old maps of this neighborhood, which showed the house we live in has been here since sometime in the 1880s. (It's hard to date precisely when the homes on this block were built because most of the records were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire.)

They explained that they were seeking bottles dating from the late 19th century and from the old land maps, they had identified properties that have not been significantly reconfigured since that era. Plumbing arrived slowly in these areas of town, so everyone had privies dug in their backyards.

By the turn of the century, when the houses got indoor plumbing, the outhouses were carted away and the privies were filled with dirt. First, however, most people sealed off the aromatic "night soil" with a layer of bottles and other items. 

They typically found what they were looking for about four and a half feet below the surface. So they went around the perimeter of our backyard, probing for glass at about that depth. They quickly identified the spot -- it's about halfway back to the rear property line on the left side of the yard.

They roughed out the likely dimensions of the old privy and set to work. When they were about four feet down they hit the first glass -- shards and some whole bottles from the Prohibition era. They were ceramics, liquor bottles and other machine-engineered bottle pieces.

Then they hit layers of a new kind of dirt -- the fine ash from fireplaces. This indicated a dry hole, where not much corrosion was likely to have occurred.

On and on they dug -- five, feet, six feet -- now finding bottles from right around the year of the earthquake. Other items emerged -- the corroded half of an old pistol, the remains of what looked like a toy train, a piece of a pipe. Down another foot and they reached the 1890s.

They brought up an almost perfect brown teapot. The ceramic handle for a dresser drawer, a partial glass candlestick, an old button.

At eight feet they finally hit pay dirt: A whole cache of bottles, many bearing their manufacturer's names like Dr. J. E.Plouf's Rheumatism Cure, and Lengfeld's Prescription Pharmacy, San Francisco. These were all from the 1880's and 1890's, and thanks to the ash, in surprisingly good condition.

My eight-year-old daughter helped comb through the pile of dirt excavated shovelful by shovelful. When the pit got too deep, the guys lowered the pail and then hauled up, like miners, the following:


Piso's Cure for Consumption
Paul Rieger's Jamaica Ginger, S.F. Cal (for hangovers)
California Fig Syrup Co.
Tillman's Extract
Dr.King's New Discovery for Consumption
Enterprise Sodaworks S. F. (soda bottle)


Lots of bottles of petroleum jelly, including Vapo-Cresolene Co. All in all, the haul was about three dozen bottles -- including a red bitters bottle, milk and cream bottles, as well as the exquisitely painted purple candlestick fragment.

That pit told more about who lived here and how they lived than anyone alive today could possibly remember. After extracting these treasures, the guys (aided again by my daughter) refilled the pit and let the rest of its history rest in piece.

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