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With the sweet little
down-time available to indulge in over this past summer and spring, my
very first chance to head out for a short dig did not come in April of
this year, or May. The summer of 2010 has taken me on a whirlwind tour of
both northern and eastern Canada. From nearly Pond Inlet, NU to Halifax,
NS – my distance traveled spanned some 20,000km, and entailed nearly 50
hours spent in various aircraft. Under the guise of a “summer job”
and “school” of all things, I was lucky enough this year to travel
to some of the most startlingly beautiful places I have ever visited, and
certainly some that I (and most other people) would never have expected
to.
With only my precious 3
weeks total of downtime, I continued to pursue the artifacts of local
historical significance that I spend hundreds of hours each year out
searching for – digging in ditches, old refuse dumps, and walking dozens
of kilometers of rail lines and farmers fields. The requirement to stay
indoors for numerous excessively hot days this summer did not help my
situation. The question this year was – would I have enough time to find
“the big one”, or anything at all?
I returned on August 23rd
from my summer job as a student geologist at an exploration-stage iron
mining company on northern Baffin Island. I had been gone for 40 days, and
I knew I was slated to leave for the Maritime Provinces for a 10 day field
course on the 1st of September. This left me only just over one
week to relax, spend time with friends, and hopefully get in just one
bottle or insulator dig to satisfy my craving to get dirty! My 1 week off,
with everything I was trying to cram into it, was probably busier than
much of the time I had just spent working over the summer.
So it came to be that the
25th of August, 2010 was my first chance in that year to get
out and look for some bottles. I picked Kyle up at about 9 AM, after
sleeping in for a change. We had a few errands to run, including picking
one half bushel of pickling cucumbers to make home made pickles. Errands
occupied much of the morning, and our dump visit was finally had sometime
around 12:30 PM, after eating lunch.
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The dump we had been
digging in is one that Kyle and I discovered back in 2007 while perusing
some woodlands in the hopes of stumbling across something in the way of a
dump. We happened to spy a few stray shards of glass and one complete
furniture polish bottle protruding from the ground. Fast forward to 3
years later, and we’ve punched more than a dozen substantial holes in the
landscape around this dump, and have extracted dozens of excellent local
medicine bottles, and a variety of other odd pieces from around Ontario.
One bottle variety the dump had always refused to produce is any variety
of soda bottle from the earlier ages of the dump. We have estimated the
age of the dumping to be sometime from around 1900, to around the early
1930s. Screw-capped bottles are rare in this dump, with most examples
being ground-lip if any are found whatsoever. Of interest in this dump is
an exceptionally high incidence of “throw-backs”, or bottles which predate
in manufacturing the age of the dump in which they are found. Large parts
of the dump contain abundant medicinal bottles from the 1890s to the early
1900s, mixed with cork-topped sauce and crown-topped soda bottles from the
1930s. Although nothing absolutely amazing had ever been discovered, the
occasional rare throw-back has continued to make visits to the dump
worth-while to dig. With any luck, today would be one productive day.
Upon arrival, Kyle and I
set to work (as always in these situations). The digging produced dozens
of common unembossed medicine bottles, food & sauce bottles, broken
preserve jars (including one clear Beaver quart), and the odd 1920s-30s
heavy pop bottle thrown in for good measure. For reasons unknown, a
particularly large quantity of automobile parts was dumped in this area,
which makes digging challenging. There seems to be no end to the
batteries, gaskets, knobs, grease caps, tire parts, and various other iron
objects that always seem to get in the way of your shovel at just the
right (or wrong) time. On this particular day, I was digging in one of
these car-part rich pockets, which seemed to hinder each scoop of the
shovel. With the dump almost 4’ deep in some places, a 3’ long iron bar
protruding from the edge of the hole can very much frustrate the
unmotivated digger!
Being late August, it was
quite a hot day the entire time we dug the area. Surprisingly, the
mosquitoes left us alone, but the inevitable dry spell began to set in by
around 3 o’ clock or so. We began to realize at this point that nothing
but common bottles had been removed from the muck and iron-stained soil.
Just around that time, we finally had a lucky break when I pulled from the
dirt an intact 2 oz. ornate “W.H.STEPLER” Strathroy dispensing chemist
bottle, only centimeters under the surface. Despite being Strathroy’s most
common local medicine bottle, Kyle and I have found surprisingly few of
these aesthetically appealing bottles. Naturally, this made the day
instantly productive!
As 3:30 rolled around, it
began to become apparent that this may become another day in our little
dump that would produce little more than one local medicine bottle and a
lot of decaying car batteries and gaskets from the 1930s. As I was
pondering a possible  location change to another area of the dump to start
a new hole, I felt the satisfying “thunk!” of the shovel on an obviously
intact bottle. As I cleared dirt away from the object at the deepest end
of my 3 ½’ deep excavation, I could see the ground lip of an older
preserve jar. With no sense for the colour of shape of the jar as of yet,
I had the distinctive feeling the piece could be a Beaver jar. No less
than a half dozen Beaver jars had been found broken in this dump so far –
more than any other variety of fruit jar. I decided I had best be
especially careful with this piece in getting it out. I set to work
digging the dirt around the piece in order to more easily dislodge it from
the ground. As more dirt cleared away from the piece it began to resemble
a Beaver jar all the more. “Kyle, I think I have something!” I voiced to
my digging partner. I continued to remove dirt from beside the jar, as
Kyle stood beside me and watched. The shovel contacted something to the
right of the jar with a hollow “thud”. At first glace the heavily crazed
creamy coloured object that came partially into view looked like a portion
from another car battery. I hurriedly removed dirt from around the object
in order to clear it from the area I was trying to dig. As more of the
object came into view, it began to resemble some sort of stoneware. “Don’t
be so forceful with that…” Kyle seemed to plead quite suddenly, as if he
had had some revelation about what it was I had found. At that exact
moment, I had a revelation of my own. The size, colouration, and lustre of
the object I had been impatiently trying to dislodge from the hole in
order to get my preserve jar free closely resembled that of a one pint
ginger beer! One final gentle pry of the shovel was all it took for the
piece to become dislodged from the soft, black soil of the very basal
layer of the dump. I reached into the hole and pulled the bottle free.
Kyle was right in his suspicion. I was holding only the second intact
ginger beer bottle I had ever excavated.
In the moment immediately
following the unveiling of the ginger beer, I still had no idea what
marking the piece possessed, if any. The wet dark soil clung to the piece
desperately as I quickly rolled it over looking for any of that tell-tale
black ink. It had an unusually tall and narrow neck, with an unusually
dark brown coloured glaze around the neck and shoulder. This combined with
the dramatic crazing all over the cream-coloured glaze of the bottle
itself should have been enough to tell me immediately what I had. As I
wiped the dirt away from all sides of the bottle with my moisture and
soil-soaked work gloves, I saw what it was my afternoon of dirt-slinging
had produced… a monkey shooting a seltzer bottle. I was holding a T.H.Hutchinson pint ginger beer bottle, of the scarce Brantford pottery
variety, with one nicely smudged pictorial of a monkey shooting a seltzer
bottle on the front. I was absolutely amazed! In our three years of
digging in and around this dump, neither Kyle nor I had produced even
shards of any soda bottles this nice. This was the only pre-1920s soda
bottle that had come out of the ground so far, and it was an exceptionally
nice one. The bottle itself was in good condition, with a few very small
lip pings, and one 15mm flat flake on the rear base edge. It felt amazing
to pull that rusty, dirty bottle from the ground after probably 90 years
of burial. This piece emerged from the ground as a valued antique, after
being buried as garbage in the earliest part of the 20th
century.
Being at the very base of
the dump, and also being among the oldest bottles recovered to date from
that location, I can only assume that this piece was probably part of some
of the earliest refuse dumping at this spot.
With the bothersome
ginger beer now out of the way, I proceeded to dig the preserve jar out of
the ground using the space I had cleared. With my fingers crossed
(difficult to do while wielding a shovel), I picked the jar from the dirt
and wiped all sides of it clean. “CROWN” came into view in large letters,
along with a normal dotted crown.
Oh well – maybe this dump
will yield a Beaver jar one of these days. I am sure Kyle and I will be
back to it numerous times! Now, to find the time… |
