antique bottles BOTTLE DIGGING IN COALMINE COUNTRY bottle digging

A Bitters Tale!

ebay By Louie Novatnak nasa

There are no atheists in foxholes and no pessimists in outhouse holes. You have to have a lot of faith! Persistence is the most valuable tool a digger has.

I'll never forget my first dig. It was in Carlisle, Pa., a frontier town in the 1700's, George Washington gave a speech on the town square!

Thoughts of wildly colored flasks danced in my head as we drove to the house where we had permission to sink our shovels into nirvana. As we uncovered the top of the 5' x 8' stoneliner, my wizard digging partner said, “maybe we'll get lucky”. Maybe!?! Maybe!?! Didn't he realize how old this town was? Couldn't he see this was a stonelined bottle store? Well a hundred ketchup bottles later, reality set in. So I listened and learned, about honeydippers, about city holes versus country holes, children and rocks, etc. But I never gave up because I got the fever. And as sure as water will eventually wear down a rock, you finally get into the kind of hole you find yourself daydreaming about

About 100 miles north of Carlisle are the patch towns of the coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania. Many outhouses still stand, a few still used. Bathrooms came late to these small towns. When king coal toppled from his throne the area fell on hard times and money was needed elsewhere when you had a perfectly good outhouse. But when coal was in demand, nothing stood in the way, not even the very house you lived in! The coal company owned all the houses anyway. So, if they were digging in the direction of the houses and coal was still coming out they would move the houses. What happened to the bottles in the ground I don't have to tell you. So if the house is over 100 years old you still need to do some homework because the backyard might have only been there for 60. .

So, on a beautiful August morning, my digging partner Bob Ernst and I set off for a small town outside of Hazleton. When we arrived Bob informed me that at one time as many as eight houses sat in an L shape around what must have been a common ground that we now stood on. What was left standing was a house from about 1880 and a large stone foundation as well as gates and walks that headed off in all directions. One thing was certain though, the common ground was loaded with outhouses! It would eventually yield nine. With one being the best either of us ever dug.

No coal, just bottles.

The outhouses on the outside perimeter of the “L” shape were dug and we were now probing the center area of the common ground where 2 holes had given us some decent bottles in the last week. We knew there had to be more in this area. As Bob probed various spots, I was preoccupied with a long narrow section of ground that was hard as a rock. It just didn't look right. The probe was literally bouncing off the ground. I had probed it about three times prior to this with the same results, when all of a sudden, wham, like an arrow finding a seam in a suit of armor, down goes the probe to the handle! But when I got to probe about a foot away, can't get in, so I put the probe in the original hole, tilt the probe sideways and it's nothing but soft crunches.

Now remember, holes were being found here left and right, so while I had probed this before and I knew something was up. Before I could investigate further, Bob would yell out, “got one here”! With your partner opening one up and no time constrictions on having to be out of a yard, ya sorta go with the flow knowing that in time you'll get to it. So the time had come to find out what lay below. Raising the pick, Bob slammed it down into the ground and I watched the impact force travel from the head of the pick, right up his arms. Bob loves to dig, it's like having a backhoe for a digging partner. That pick went up and down twenty times hard, it was an impressive sight. He penetrated the ground a full five inches! But we kept at it and in about fifteen minutes we broke through to ash. We opened the hole up about two feet square on top by slamming the top layer of dirt with a sledgehammer and breaking chunks. The only way to describe the dirt, which was the hardest, most compact dirt I've ever seen, is a mixture of clay and silt (coal-dust).

We went to the right about a foot and found a side, and the other two sides were found just as quick. So we had an opening 4' x 3' with three sides found. We had probed the sides after we broke through and could only hope for a little length in the other direction, the depth with the top off was about five feet. But the biggest question was, as it always is, are we lucky today? The second shovel of ash brought the sweetest sound a digger can hear, that beautiful screech of a bottle being disturbed from a sound sleep. Let's at least have a corktop so we can have some age, I thought. Bob brushed away the dirt to get a look at what he had scraped against. “It's a bitters”, he yelled. Sure enough, as I looked over where the second shovel of dirt came out, the square bottom of a brown bottle stood straight up! Two scrapes around and out came a “Tellier's Herb Bitters”.

Louie Novatnak and digging partner Bob Ernst with the day's haul.

Except for a slight amount of stain, the bottle was in the most unbelievable condition. No ground wear, no scratches, no chips, nothing. In fact, every bottle to come out of this hole was in the same condition. I've never seen a good bottle that was so close to the top. This hole was to be full of surprises. We got to be careful now, I said, as Bob extracted a clay pipe with the whole stem intact. Time to switch to the small shovel. Two shovels into the ash and we were using tools you usually use towards the bottom. One shovel more and sitting on the shovel is another whole clay pipe and an eight sided cobalt blue “C. Heimstreet & Co.” Troy, N.Y., smooth base. I took the shovel two more shovels and out comes a green Dyottville and another whole pipe. In fact, a total of 22 whole pipes would come out. Nothing fancy, but odd just in the fact that so many were whole.

Another Dyottville and another, scrape a little more and there's the top of what looks like another bitters! It is! A heavily whittled Mishler's in a deep chocolate brown. Wait another one! No, wait a second, I know those corners. The mouth of the bottle showed itself first, then the neck, then the shoulders, rope shoulders that continued into roped corners and it was out! A “Rohrer's Expectoral Wild Cherry Tonic, Lancaster, PA”, smooth base. I hand the shovel to my partner and tell him to dig another Rohrer's so we both get one, but does he listen to me? No, he brings out two! And another Mishler's, Dyottville, and three more pipes. I go at it for a little and a Bruceline Hair Restorative comes out in cobalt with a big flared lip and without a scratch, unbelievable. Then the bottom.

So we start going in the only direction we have left. And go it did, the hole would turn out to be 4'w x 5'd x 9'l, woodlined. To make the split even, I dig yet another Rohrer's and other Tellier's. The cap or top of this hole is the only explanation I can think of for the condition of the bottles. I cleaned a Mishler's and a Tellier's so far from this dig and to say the bottles are in attic like condition would be no stretch of the truth. Another thing out of whack was the dimensions of the hole for this area. Very shallow and very long. And the pipes, so many whole pipes. This most certainly will be a day that I'll never forget. It certainly was worth waiting for! The bottles seemed concentrated right where we first went down, but we did pick up some more on the nine foot to the other side.....

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