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.