I Stumbled Upon An Edwardian Trash Dump!

[SwiftSword]

Last Wednesday I was traipsing around my local woods (former farmland) here in Eastern Massachusetts when I hit a concentration of signals near an old stone wall. It turned out to be barrel hoops, an old pail, and a multitude of what I think are old battery cores. But with each object I also dug broken glass and crockery. Everything was just under the surface, and the whole looked very much like the bottle dump I had found only a few weeks earlier a couple of miles away. I put the detector aside and dug horizontally. Soon I pulled out an intact medicine bottle, made for a cork, with a smooth lip, so early 1900s at the latest. The other bottle dump had been from the 1930s. This was going to be good!

The top layer of soil was a dense mat of roots. I soon switched to lifting a section with one hand like a blanket, and rooting around under it with the other, pulling whole and broken bottles out by the handful. It wasn't just bottles - there was a large amount of broken crockery, barrel hoops, battery cores, bricks, oyster shells, animal bones, bits of sheet metal, wire, and plate glass.

It took me three visits to clear the place out. In the end, it appears to have been a shallow ditch right in front of the wall, about 3 feet by 50 feet. Most broken items were near the wall (probably thrown or crushed against it), most intact bottles were about 1-2 feet away from the wall, and mostly right at the surface.

Last Sunday it bucketed all day, so I chose to do the dishes, as it were. I used dish soap, sponges, a regular bottle brush, a pipe cleaner wrapped around a length of wire, and one of those long, flexible grabbers with a bit of steel wool at the end. It took a few good hours to do everything. My hands are quite sore, but I very much enjoyed it. The most fun are the embossed bottles. I used the text on them as keywords and found that most have been thoroughly researched, with each one being its own rabbit hole.

The bottles contained health and beauty products, "snake oil" patent medicines, laundry chemicals, dyes and shoe polish. A disproportionate number were for salad dressing. There were few, if any, for drinks or liquor.

One that stood out for me was "Johnson's American Anodyne", a patent medicine that was indicated for "coughs, colds, grippy cold, colic, asthmatic distress, bronchial colds, nasal catarrh, cholera morbus, cramps, diarrhea, bruises, common sore throat, burns and scalds, chaps and chafing, chilblains, frost bites, muscular rheumatism, soreness, sprains and strains"

It was able to effect all these cures because its main ingredients were alcohol and morphine. Apparently these bottles are sometimes found on WWI battlefields in France. American troops weren't issued an alcohol ration, so the Doughboys took a swig of this stuff before they went over the top.

Another was "Dr. True's Elixir", which was advertised as the world's #1 intestinal worm cure. It actually contained an ingredient that paralyzed the heads of worms and caused them to be shat out, so it's not "snake oil" per se, but in those pre-FDA days, it was advertised in the most outrageous fashion, with the inventor claiming to have cured patients of tapeworms 70 and 80 feet long, of spotted lizards, snakes, and other unlikely creatures. Nonetheless, this medicine seems to have been very ubiquitous, and this fascinating bottle isn't exactly rare.

More pictures:

Same product, different packaging.

 

All the "medicine" bottles. 

 

Bromo-Seltzer cured many a hangover. 

 

I believe the middle one was for olive oil. 

 

There's still 110+ year-old vaseline in the jar. I'm not trying it, though. 

 

This was a popular brand of salad dressing. Manufactured by Fred Fear & Co. which is the coolest name ever. 

Worm Expeller!

Gotta love the embossing!

This bottle of dye still had a brush in it. 

 

It was a lot of dish-washing. 

There were quite a few metal finds mixed in. Nothing exciting.  

Lots and lots of broken glass as well.

Spoons, the bane of my existence.

Knives are usually pretty rare. Here I found three in one go.

Lots of clam and oyster shells, and thousands of pork and beef bones. 

it was a lot of fun and a lot of work. Time for a cold brew from an ancient glass 😄

[Doc Bach]

Great post SwiftSword!

That dig must have been a blast.I particularly like the Dr.Trues and the heavily embossed Genuine Sandfords medicines.I'm a little surprised that you did not turn up some of the other usual suspects such as marbles, buttons coins and tokens.If you do not have the time to do a little sifting make sure to try and get back after a good rain and see what might turn up.Nice photos and story and thanks for posting.

[SwiftSword]

It's definitely an odd mix. So much salad dressing, but where are the beer and soda bottles? I didn't sift, but went through the debris with my gloved hands. Might have to go back with a sieve! 

[JCR]

Very nice.  Thanks for posting.

[CPT_GhostLight]

Congrats on the treasure trove of glassware! That looks like it was a lot of work, well done!

[rvpopeye]

Interesting post ! I once lived in an old house built by one of those  miracle cure salesmen..

[Ridge Runner]

Lots of bitter’s bottles and I see some old milk bottles that had a paper cap back when.

 You done good for sure.

 Lots of history in bottles if you’re willing to spend the time with them and how they were made .

 Chuck 

[IdahoPeg]

Wow, awesome finds and great post! Thanks for sharing.