bottle digging Has Anyone Ever Dug More? privy digging
ebay By Steve DeBoode nasa

What’s the largest group of identical bottles you’ve ever heard dug from a single site? 50 Hostetters Bitters, a hundred Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription, 500 Fletcher’s Castoria?… Over the years, I’ve heard of digs that have turned up hundreds of examples of the same bottle also known as "cache digging". So, what do you do with all of these bottles dug from one spot? Say hello to all the readers of Antique Bottle & Glass Collector magazine, of course! While not as inspiring as our last dig (A.B. & G.C. September 2000 issue), it was a sight to see…
As always, it started with my uncle, John DeBoode, and his daily drives around Grand Rapids looking for potential digging sites. Since "the well dig" a year ago, it’s been slim pickings. Our luck had to change for the better sooner or later. Spring finally arrived and with it came several vacant lots with heavy construction equipment and rumors of new buildings. Yeehaw!! One particular site that looked real promising was at the corner of Michigan and Lafayette. A new medical building is being built but first they had to dig out FIFTEEN FEET of dirt for a basement. The stuff bottle digger’s dreams are made of. We just know this lot is going to produce because of the number of nice bottles that John and Gary Grabau, another local digger, unearthed on the lot next door about 10 years ago and has since become a parking lot.
After waiting patiently for nearly a month, the excavators start clearing the site and the siege begins. The three of us "tag team" the dig to keep tabs on their progress. The first couple of weeks produce a few trash pits and a couple of cisterns yielding numerous common bottles and several interesting pieces.
During Gary’s watch in a morning downpour, one of the cisterns gave up a local milk bottle from a dairy none of us had ever heard of – MICHIGAN ST. DAIRY / H. VAN EENENNAAM & SON from Grand Rapids! Pretty cool but we knew there were better spots to be found… Come on Grand Rapids! Show me the bottles!! John calls after work and says he’s going down to check how far they got today. I had an appointment later and decided not to go.

About 7:00pm. I left for my appointment, which took me right past the site and saw John’s truck still there… Hmmm… I had a few extra minutes to kill so I pulled in to see what he’s been digging in for the last 2 hours. I jumped down into the hole where he’s at and there sites the biggest pile of cobalt blue glass I’ve ever seen! "Dang! You found all this since you got here?" I said. John poked his head out of the hole and says, "This is nothing, go look in the back of my truck."
I walked over and took a peek – I kid you not… the entire bed was covered with bimal, cork top, cobalt blue BROMO CAFFIENE bottles!! Holy #%!@$ The pile I had looked at earlier was just the broken and badly damaged ones. I continued on my way and John finished up with over 800 Bromos that night. Gary and I went back the next day but didn’t see much. Day late and a dollar short… Oh well, at least I got to see it.
The following day, John was back at the site and wouldn’t you know it, the construction guys hit a continuation of his Bromo hole and it ran along an old foundation for 6 or 7 feet off his original hole. John can’t believe his luck…. He’s pulling out Bromos by the handfuls same as before. He dug until dark and once again filled the back of his truck bringing home nearly 900 more!!
When John called me that night and told me, I just about croaked. I yelled, "How many!" I thought he was kidding. I called Gary and told him to be at the site the next morning. I said to him, "eighteen hundred Bromos has to be some kind of record." Gary was there bright and early digging where John had left off. By the time I got there after work, he had pulled out the remaining 530 Bromos and finished the hole. Darn, I missed it again. Sitting in the middle of the site were several large piles of dirt taken from the same area where the Bromo hoard had come from.
It was 90 degrees and humid but dog-gone it, I was going to find some Bromos if it killed me! Gasping for air, nearly dehydrated and almost 2 hours later, I had thoroughly raked out the piles and for my effort was rewarded with a grand total of 12…. Yeah, you read it right, and even dozen. We headed for home absolutely certain that the Bromo "find of a lifetime" was over. But! As Paul Harvey is so fond of saying, "and now for the rest of the story" Fate just couldn’t leave well enough alone.
Several days later at the same site, in the same spot, a backhoe accidentally broke through the top of a cistern sitting directly beneath the Bromo hole and guess who happened to be there… To make a long story short, they scooped out the entire cistern and laid out the contents of it right in front of John then refilled the hole with clean sand. When he finished loading his buckets, he had over 750 more Bromos!! Between the three of us, the final tally was 3011. While digging that many cobalt blue bottles was fun, the downside was having to wash them all for the photo…. It took a month.
Gary swears he’ll never bring home another Bromo again. John still sees them in his sleep but another month of therapy and he should be back to normal. Me, I’ve got my 12 hard earned Bromos in a backlit, glass shelved, temperature controlled display case held tight with earthquake putty and wired into our home security system. AHA..HA..HA..HA..HAAA… oops, gotta go… almost time for my medication. If it hadn’t been for the 12 I raked out of the piles, they only would have had 2,999. It’s nice to know I did my part (chuckle, snort.). So how about it folks, over 3000 identical bottles… Has anyone ever dug more?

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