November, 30th 2007 Privy Dig
Wilmington Delaware today. I wasn't planning on digging today but I had talked to Matt the night before and him, Alan, and George were planning to dig a couple pits on the east side of town in the morning. And asked me if I wanted to come up and dig with them. I told them it all depends on how I feel in the morning. And when morning finally came I said screw it I'm going digging. So I left around 7:30 so I could meet up with the gang in Wilmington around 9:00. I arrived and the boys showed me the yard they dug in the day before. They weren't sure if they found the privy or just dug a trash pit in the yard. The feature they dug was very shallow only about 3 feet deep. I probed a few other spots in the yard and quickly found a brickliner they missed. We decided to dig it. It was a small round one about 3 feet across that is very typical of this side of town. We started digging it down and it was ashy and easy digging for the first 5 feet. Then we hit about a 3 foot layer of bricks and clay. Finally this gave way to a nice loamy 4 feet of trash that dated from the 1880s-1900. We found about half a dozen local pharmacy bottles and quite a few pipes, marbles and other bottles. It was a nice quick dig we were finished up and the finds split up by 3:00 and I was on my way home. Also check out the three links below to some short video clips from this dig.
