Sunday February 22nd 2009 Privy Dig
Today we are digging in Baltimore again. We decried to try an 1860s part of town. we started out digging a couple very shallow woodliners that had been totally cleaned. Then moved on to another block and encountered the same thing. After that we went for a drive and looked in a block we have found good things in before. The pits in this block are 7 foot deep double barrels and tend to have a couple feet of early 1860s layer in the bottom. We noticed one recently emptied house with a dirt back yard and I probed out a woodlliner. We opened it up and it was a barrel like the others we have dug here. At about 3 and a half feet the second barrel started but so did the water. About a foot and a half into this second barrel the trash layer started. The age looked promising with 1870s looking ironstone and bottle fragments then out came an open pontiled barrel mustard after a bit of water bailing. I got in the pit and started digging in the soupy black muck. I quickly found a pint sized spring garden glassworks log cabin flask and two smooth based sodas from Washington DC and a blue pontiled soda that sadly wasn't embossed. I got out and Doug got in and found a smooth based Philly soda and some pontiled puffs. and then bottom. This wasn't a bad little pit it had several decent bottles in it and enough bottles for everyone to get one.
