Friday December 26th 2008 Privy Dig
Today The gang and I are digging in Wilmington on a permission Alan scored. We had two fairly deep brickliners to dig so I arranged a group of guys to dig. We arrived around 7:00am and started work after getting a few feet into both pits we found they had both been dug years before hand. Likely by Doug in the 1980s but he's dug so many pits he's forgotten more than most people will ever dig. So me and Alan started walking around looking for something to dig. When we spotted a guy walking up the street and Alan quickly struck up a conversation and got us permission to dig in his yard. I probed out the pit it was a large round brickliner. Three of us started work on this pit while the other 3 drove around town looking for another pit to get into. About 4 feet into our pit we hit water. This pit was very wet and slow going. So we called the rest of the team back to help with this one pit. By this time it was nearly noon. We continued bailing our way down another 4 feet until we encountered about a 500 pound stone in the middle of the pit. It was so slippery and wet we couldn't get a rope around it to pull it out. Alan test holed down a couple feet next to it and soon hit a black layer laden with 1880s artifacts. But there was no way to safely dig this pit with the stone in it. So it was decided that we would cover it for the night and come back in the morning. I would bring a come along and some straps to put around the stone then we could hoist it out using the tripod. We arrived early the next morning and made quick work of removing the stone and then Alan got in and removed the rest of the clay covering the trash layer. This layer ended up being about 6 feet deep and had quite a few bottles dating from the early 1860s to the early 1880s. The best find was a light Yellow J & IEM turtle ink.
