Sunday January 4th 2009 Privy Dig
We are back in Wilmington again today The guy who let us dig in his yard last week got us permission to dig his neighbors privy. You got to love friendly people like that. This house was a bit older likely late 1840s early 1850s. It was a shared brickliner with another empty house. This one was smaller in size then the last one we dug in this row. We had a slightly different group of diggers today. It consisted of Myself, Alan, Doug, George, and The new guy Greg. We all took turns digging this one down and at about 4 feet we let Alan in to dig just as we started hitting a layer of bricks and rocks mixed with clay and ash fun stuff to dig in. As Alan was fighting the fill I set up the tripod and we started bucketing out the fill. After getting through about 3 feet of this debris George got in the pit and about anoy=ther foot doun he hit water but with the water started a trash layer full of 1890s bottles. This layer ended up being about 4 feet thick and quickly dropped back in age to the 1860s. A few pontiled Bringhursts essences and a pine tree tar cordial and a pontiled Doyttville glassworks squat were found. along with lots of smooth based Wilmington sodas and other smooth based bottles.
