Christmas Isn’t Just for Kids!
But for dedicated bottle diggers, too!
by Andy Goldfrank

About a year and a half ago, in my endless quest for pontiled bottles, I was roaming the cobblestone streets of Fell’s Point in Baltimore, Maryland looking for digging spots when a demolition notice posted on the facade of a 1920s concrete slab-floor commercial garage and industrial space caught my eye.
Rather quickly, I jockeyed my car into a nearby parking spot in order to get a closer look at the site. As I hurried over, I memorized the names of the streets surrounding the site so that I could check the location on historical maps of the city.

Tom Salvatore peeks out from an early 1800's privy on the Fell's Point lot.	The author holds a freshly excavated pontiled P. Babb soda from Baltimore, Maryland and pontiled cobalt star ink.

Now a reader might wonder about my interest in a relatively new building when my search is for older, pontiled bottles. First of all, this structure was located in the midst of buildings dating back to the 1700s near the original city dock, and there likely had been older structures on the same lot. Second, a close examination revealed that the building was sitting on a poured concrete slab-floor without a basement which meant that any privies on the site most likely were not disturbed when the older buildings were razed and the 1920s garage constructed. That night, a review of an 1850s map indicated that between four and six buildings had been located on the odd trapezoid-shaped lot — this appeared to be a prime spot. The only problem was that in the coming months I was scheduled to work for long periods of time in Florida, meaning that I would not be around to monitor construction on the lot or to do much digging.
Not wanting a good site to go to waste, I passed on the location of the pending demolition location to a few of my digging buddies.

Pot lids from the Christmas Dig.

Over the next six months, after the building was demolished and the site lay vacant, a number of us managed to locate and excavate almost 10 privies dating back to the early 1700s with decent results. I even squeezed in a couple of digs between work trips to Miami. My best finds were all damaged or in extraordinarily sick condition and included a cobalt star or scalloped umbrella ink, a "P. BABB / BALTo" soda, and an aqua open-pontil medicine-shaped bottle embossed "Kelly’s Patented Mineral Water."
Others found comparable pits with pontiled sodas, medicines, and utilities but in general there was nothing outstanding. As predicted, the privies were all intact beneath the garage’s concrete slab floor; however, the site was impossible to probe due to a layer of hard-packed fill and the only way to locate an outhouse was to dig test holes. Moreover, because of the odd shape of the lot, it was hard to predict where the privies were located.
By the middle of December, the consensus among our group of diggers was that there could be additional outhouses on the site but without testing every square inch they would be difficult to find, so we decided to start focusing on other sites.

Squat sodas from the Fell's Point Christmas Day dig after a quick rinse.

Shortly thereafter, Christmas rolled around; my wife Joan and I headed off to New York to spend time with family and friends over the holidays. During this week, I turned off my cell phone so as to have a relaxing time away from the office. As we headed back toward Washington, we planned on staying with Joan’s brother in Cherry Hill, New Jersey for a night or two. In order to coordinate arriving at his house, I turned on my cell phone, saw there were messages and was checking my voice mail when I heard a strange message from Tom Salvatore.
In typical fashion, Tom had left a hurried message that he had dug another privy on the Fell’s Point site "yesterday," that he had sent me some "cool" pictures, and that he wanted me to call. I then checked the time stamp on the message and realized that he must have dug a privy on Christmas Day.
"This should be interesting," I thought to myself, as I wondered how Tom managed to excuse himself from familiar duties with his wife Mia and their two boys on Christmas. In answer to my musing, here is his tale of his Christmas Day dig as told via e-mail and orally, and the short answer is simply that if nothing else Tom is one persistent and lucky guy.
Tom says that he "woke up Dec. 25th and conducted Christmas with Mia and the boys." After the normal stresses of a Christmas with two little boys, Tom told me that he "was later granted some dig time, which I quickly accepted and ran out the door. My intent was to go up to Baltimore to inventory the city for new projects and sites and getting back early enough that the wife wouldn’t get too antsy."
Tom’s first inclination was to revisit the Fell’s Point site, despite the consensus that it was played out, and give it one last try. He later told me: "I walked up to the middle of the lot, less than six feet from where you and Phil found the star ink, drove my shovel into the dirt and bit into wood on the first push. Sure enough, there it was — a wood wall. There was no doubt that it was a privy."
Following the rotted board, Tom discovered that the pit had been filled with brick rubble for almost three feet. After a couple of hours, he started finding 1880s Baltimore sodas. It appeared that the privy had never been fully cleaned out and when probed the pit was loaded with four feet of privy soil. After taking another foot out of the 4-foot by 4-foot square, and discovering 15 more 1880s blob sodas, Tom hit an older layer that contained pontil-era relics.
Immediately, Tom pulled out a green iron-pontiled P. Babb soda from 1853-57 and as he said, "a bottle that alone usually constitutes a great dig in Baltimore. I literally skipped like a schoolgirl with the soda off to my truck and then back to the hole." Within a minute Tom popped out another soda: an iron-pontiled Superior Soda Water with an embossed eagle, shield and crossed flags in cobalt! Back to the truck Tom went. Returning to the outhouse, he shortly thereafter extracted a pale green "Wm. Russell" torpedo from Baltimore. Tom later noted that this "was the first torpedo that I ever saw."
Not wanting to waste time, Tom focused on digging and unearthed another group of sodas including four more Baltimore sodas in a row. There was nothing Tom could do to lessen these trips to his vehicle because he did not want to leave these bottles laying on the ground; thus, as he put it: "It was time to go back to the truck, get a drink and return as fast as I can to the hole. And then the next bottle was another Superior Soda Water, but in amber ... it was back to the truck time."

Iron-pontiled amber and cobalt Superior Soda Waters with tapered lips.

After that trip he jumped into the hole and flipped out a light blue or sapphire "Polk & Co." 10-pin soda from Baltimore. Unbelievable!
Tom retold the story by noting, "it was back to the truck and time to throw some water on my face because I am so excited." As he was cleaning out the corners of the privy box, Tom "cranked out a pile" of miscellaneous aqua pontiled utilities, medicines, and even some transfer-laden Hauel, Roussel and X. Bazin Beef Marrow pots and lids. In their midst, he also found an amber open-pontil scalloped or star umbrella ink in perfect condition. At that point, Tom’s heart was pounding but he still had the drive remaining to check to see it there were any other privies in the vicinity. He pried a wood board out and stumbled upon "another twin privy with another cubic yard of brown gold!"
In his desire to extract more treasures quickly, Tom violated a cardinal rule of digging and tunneled over to the other side leaving a layer of unstable bricks hanging over him. He later wrote in an e-mail: "I chose this over digging the hole out from the top down and it was a decision that I would soon regret."
After clearing the wood wall from the second privy box, Tom saw the bottoms of three open-pontil bottles. One of those was an open-pontiled Stoddard 12-sided ink. Again it was "back to the truck time." Returning to the outhouse, Tom was scratching out a bottle every few minutes and "getting further from daylight than I really should. but the bottles kept coming."
He started filling a five-gallon bucket in his tunnel and carrying it out one bucket at a time. A short time later his fingertips were just touching a bottle that felt like another 10-pin. At last Tom managed to get his hand on the bottle and then a brick hit him in the head. ("And hard.").
As he was scrambling out of the cave he had crafted, the whole brick-laden roof collapsed and Tom was hit hard twice more. Somehow, he managed to extract himself but now his hole was filled in with bricks. More importantly, the 10-pin was under the pile of rubble and Tom had visions that his poor decision-making to not dig the hole from the top not only might have killed him but also likely broke a rare and beautiful bottle after it had been preserved for over 150 years.
Tom decided to collect his thoughts plus call his wife and tell her that he was alive and well (albeit just barely). He also took some aspirin because his head was pounding as evidenced by three rapidly expanding lumps on it. Thirty minutes later he had gathered himself sufficiently to focus on the task of cleaning out the pit when he realized that buried beneath the fill was his shovel, probe and scratcher. Persistent to the end, Tom remembered that he had a spare army-trenching shovel in his truck.
The work of undoing his mess took over an hour but shortly thereafter the bottles were pouring out of the hole. It was another 45 minutes before Tom located the business end of his buried shovel, "but the 10-pin was nowhere to be seen."
Tom continued digging bottles in the remainder of the privy, including the vicinity of where he thought the 10-pin was located without success. As he was finishing up the pit, Tom yanked on his shovel and pulled it from the pile to reveal the pontiled base of the 10-pin. In a stroke of pure fate, the shovel had protected the bottle from the bricks crashing down.
Shortly thereafter, as the sun set on that extraordinary Christmas Day, one persistent and extremely fortunate grown-up kid walked his last bottle to the truck: an intact hat-topped, teal-green C.A. Cole 10-pin from the late 1840s-early 1850s.....

Baltimore's best from the Christmas Day pit waiting to be cleaned: a tapered lip sapphire Polk & Co. ten pin, a teal green hat top ten-pin C.A. Cole, and a Wm. Russell light green torpedo. (Between two hattop Twitchells from Philadelphia and a P. Babb squat from Baltimore.)	Open pontiled twelve-sided ink and star or scalloped ink from the privy dug on Christmas Day.

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