Thursday August 3rd 2006 Privy Dig
Due to the brutally hot summer we have been having I haven't been doing much digging. And this record setting heat wave going on is killing me however today the high was expected to only reach 95 and this lack of digging has been driving me crazy. So we decided to give it a try. We headed over to the west side in hopes of finding a shallow woodliner of barrel lined pit that we could finish quickly and maybe not have to deal with the midday heat. We made it over to the Poppelton area of town and quickly found a recently emptied house with a postage stamp sized back yard. we quickly found the pit it was a barrel lined pit that was shared between this house and the one next door. The neighbor had a concrete back yard so digging this hole would be no problem. We started down the one side it was light sandy soil that was easy to dig we quickly tunneled out the neighbors half and got down to the bottom of the barrel and discovered the top of a second barrel starting this is a great sign. These double barrel lined pits usually go pontil and have stuff. the first shards out were from the 1860s-70s and soon pontiled bases started appearing. out popped a common pontiled Barry's for the hair and then a big iron pontiled cylinder then more shards of yellowware and redware then bottom this turned out to only be a half barrel so it was only a 1 and 1/2 barrel deep pit we got a few keepers and the usual assortment of pipes and marbles. Not a great hole but its always nice to dig pontils and we were finished up by 1:00 so it was nice to call it an early day and beat the heat.