Thursday June 19th 2008 Privy Dig
I got a call about 9:00 this morning from John saying he was off work today and wanted to try to dig something. So He came and picked me up about 10:00 and we headed downtown to try to find a pit to dig. We ended up on the west side and got permission from a contractor that was renovating a 3 story row home that looked to be 1860s. However half the row was earlier 1830s houses so I suspected that there were earlier houses that we replaced or updated in the 1860s-70s. The back yard was concreted except one small strip for a garden but as luck would have it this was the spot the privy was in. We started taking it down it was a rectangular brick liner that was shared with the house next door. About 4 feet in the rectangular brick liner turned to a shared oval brickliner. This is a very typical occurrence. I had dug the pit for the two 1830s houses next to this one a few years before and got quite a few 1830-70s era bottles and several buckets of ceramics to reconstruct. However this pit was again heavily dipped around the turn of the century and the bottom couple feet were very wet and we only got a few unembossed bottles. This one really sucked.
