TREASURES

The entry you all have been waiting for!  Treasures from deep beneath the ground of my backyard.  The following photos are a collection of objects that have been unearthed as I did the "Big Dig" around the garage.  Special thanks to my friend Francis LasPinas for some of the more artsy photos.

THE COINS

I owe my former chickens the credit for finding the mercury head dime and the 50 cents token. (Good Lord!  I was just looking for the cent symbol on the keyboard and there isn't one!!)  You can see that the chickens got a few good pecks at the token before finally picked it up to investigate the finding.  I found the $1 token and the 2 Indian Head nickels during the dig.  I don't believe these all must have been dropped at the same time as the dime is dated 1944.  One one the nickels you can barely make out the date of 1928.  The two tokens I did some research on and here the story.  The St. Elias Packing Company has offices in Seattle and built a packing plant in Yakutat Alaska in 1909.  The records i was able to look up on line showed that it only operated this particular plant until 1916 when it was sold to another company.  I had found quite a few of these tokens on some crazy websites dedicated to token collecting. This has lead me to believe that yes, there is a website for just about anything.  One site listed these as "company script payed to workers for trade in dry goods".  So whoever had the holes in their pockets probably dropped these in my yard pretty early in the last century.  My house was built in 1920. I'm sure the garage came shortly after it.

WHO KNOWS WHAT?

So many objects lost.  So many found.  You can see the name The Wehrle Co. of Newark Ohio on the gage.  In my research I came across an article about The Wehrle Co. "maker of cooking and heating stoves".  So this is a temperature gage for a stove.  The ones I saw were small cast iron stoves that stood about 3 feet high with a door on the front.  The Wehrle Co. started in 1899 and was eventually changed their name to the Newark Stove Co. in 1939.  Sears & Roebuck Co. bought them in 1945 and began producing Kenmore Stoves at the plant.  The bottle I would like to think is old, but given the screw top and the fact I found it near where the garbage cans sit, it's probably an old vanilla bottle from the past decade.

However, this bottle shows a little more hope of being an antique.  The key?  Looks like it's for a clock.  The bullet casing?  I can imagine someone hunting grouse when it was farm fields or shooting rats in an urban alley.  The gold item is the remains of a cuff link.

I'm still looking for the fork and the plate to this set.
The spoon is actually silver.

Of course not all the objects I found were elegant treasures.  Some gave me reason to wonder.  I dug up a number of bones.  I'm not sure if they were from a family pet from long ago of if this old ax head that I uncovered had anything to do with bones.

Or these fine implements of torture.  

However Francis had a more clever outlook on these.

Imagine shaving with this.  For some of you looking at this blog you may not know what Woolworth was.  It was the Wallmart of it's time.

I found an old battery that had completely disintegrated, but the paper label remained.  Made by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co.  Check out the date.  A month and year of great importance to our country.  But behold the finest object to be pulled from the depths of the garage walls!  An object that truly symbolizes a bygone era.  Good thing to find after a hard day of digging in the dirt.

The Big Dig

BEFORE

AFTER

I have a confession.  My blog is not, at this point, in real time.  In fact, I am really months behind in my writing in comparison to where I am in this reconstruction process.  However, once I started digging out all the dirt that needed to remove in order to expose the full foundation of the garage, I have gotten the opportunity to get caught up to present time.  In fact, this blog entry could simply be this: “… and then I began to dig.  And I dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and I dug and I dug some more”.  I knew I had to move a lot of dirt.  I knew it was going to take some time.  I didn’t realize just how much.   Just take a look at this pile!

I actually started digging the weekend of Thanksgiving.  I would head out after work and limit myself to an hour of digging or until the sun went down.  On the weekends I would dedicate even more time.  I became pretty obsessed.  I thought I would breeze though it, but one never knows what they will find under the ground and I encountered many obstacles as I dug.  And, like a tired stubborn toddler who refuses to leave the park when you’re in a hurry to get home, these obstacles greatly slowed my progress.   Rocks, concrete rubble, bricks, latex balls…you name it, I probably found it buried in my yard.  The latex ball really blew me away.  It was huge!  I originally pulled it out when I planted a tree in my back yard.  I picked the place to put it, started digging and eventually began chipping out some psychedelic multi-colored rock.  I dug around it and pulled out a large boulder of dried latex paint!  It seems one of the former owners decided the best way to get rid of their old paint was to dig a huge hole and pour it in, let it dry and bury it.  When I pulled it out it left a big enough hole to fit the entire root ball of the tree I planted.  It didn’t seem to contaminate the soil as the tree is doing well after two years.  I have come to the conclusion that many years ago, when my neighborhood was a farmer’s orchard, the spot that is now my yard is where the old farmer dumped his trash.  The dig at times became like an archaeological site as I sifted through the soil with my homemade sifter.  I will have to dedicate an entry to the incredible items I pulled out of the ground and out of the walls of the garage.  Each piece sparking the depths of my imaginations as they whispered their stories to me.  Where they came from, what there life was like and how they ended up in the ground around my garage.   I found some old coins and tokens that must have fallen out of the pocket of who ever built this garage.  I found pieces of silverware, a broken mug, little bottles, large nails and spikes, pieces to an old stove, an ax head, a bullet casing and the bones to what, I do not know.  Maybe I don’t want to know.  Things that kept me guessing, wondering and daydreaming for hours.

Rocks that made up the foundation

What the hell does this go to??

All came from under my garage

However, most of the things I unearthed were more an exhausting challenge than a delightful treasure.  As my shovel banged off of one rock after another I would think back to drives I would take through the Wisconsin country side where one runs across lovely rustic fieldstone wall that travel on for miles.  Not because the farmers of the past thought to themselves “I think I’ll build a lovely rustic wall of fieldstone”.  No, it was more like “Good God, another damn rock I gotta get out of the way!” as he tried to plow the virgin landscape.  I built a similar wall along the back edge of my alley. 

The experience made me ponder and greatly appreciate what those early pioneers must have gone through to open up the square miles of land we have for farming today.  Especially if it was completely forested upon their arrival.  I can’t imagine that the first settler even saw a substantial amount of cleared land before they passed on.  I imagine it took two or three generations to clear some of this land.  Cutting trees, building a house and barn, clearing stumps (some the size of houses) removing rocks and boulders, cutting away roots. That’s what really slowed me down.  Roots spreading from plants I don’t even know where they were standing.  

THE ROCK!

Then there was the monster rock that after much digging and prying, I decided it would stay where it chose as its final resting place.  Well, rest in peace my dear rock.  You shall be not only the anchor of this foundation, but a mentor to my life’s endeavors.  Though you will be underground, the images of the struggles you put me through and the lessons of accepting that some things need not change, shall forever be in the forefront of my memories each time I enter this structure.  

Look at what's left of that foundation

NOW WHAT?