Mystery House Journal

[robertk]

Just about the time I got my new Deus II, I was looking at an old map of my neighborhood and discovered that in 1940, there was a house sitting in what is now my front yard. This surprised me greatly, so I started hunting old photos and found a 1955 aerial photo, with no trace of the house. So it was there sometime before 1940 to get "on the map", but was completely vanished by 1955.

So I worked out the distances from the old map and got a good guess to where the house was, and started hunting. I quickly discovered that my entire front yard is littered with iron.

I don't know when the house was built, but I'm assuming mid to late 1800's. So far I haven't found anything with a date on it, but what little I have found seems to back up those dates.

So I'm starting this thread to post interesting things, mostly for feedback as I try to understand the history of those who were here before I was. Here's some of the stuff I've found so far. Any comments on what they are, or what they are used for, are welcome.

This was identified (thanks to this board!) as a suspender adjuster, pre-1920.


And this one is part of a victorian bed rail attachment.


This one is a spoon, obviously. Silver plated, well worn. I haven't found an exact match on the pattern and I can't quite read the maker's mark, but the stuff I find that's close is in the early 1880's. Interestingly, I found this standing vertically in the ground, big end down. It took some digging to extract it.



I've also found a few shotgun shell end caps. At first I ignored these thinking they were just trash from a careless modern hunter, but after investigating, these are from around 1900 (Union Metal Cartridge Company, "New Club" style, produced between 1891 and 1911).


And some iron stuff...



I've found several of those square nuts. They look like they might be blacksmith-made because while the hole diameter is pretty consistent, the size and thickness of the nut itself varies quite a bit. And that thing that looks like a telegraph insulator is a mystery -- iron wouldn't make a very good insulator.

Then there's this partial plate -- quarter inch thick and heavy. Maybe a stove part?



And then there's this thing.

It's about 8" diameter, about an inch thick, with a 1/4" "rim" around one side, totally flat on the other. And it's heavy -- weighing exactly 2 kilograms (4.4 lbs) in its current state. No obvious handle or anything to indicate use.

So there's what I know so far. I will post more as I discover it...

 

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[robertk]

I've started excavating the depression. It's going to take a lot of work, as I actually want to recover the rocks themselves (will use them to build the wishing well at the old well site) as well as whatever they may be hiding.

I got down about two or three feet yesterday, one rock at a time, and recovered the next piece of the stove. I had thought that perhaps the body of the stove was right under the plate that I pulled up, but apparently not. But one of the burner covers was right there next to it, so who knows? I told my wife that I would keep digging until I ran out of rocks (or hit bedrock, whichever comes first).

Here's the burner cover. Looks like it has the number "37" or maybe "87" on it. The ring is frozen to the plate, if indeed it was ever loose. Then there's a second shot showing it sitting on the stovetop that I recovered the other day.



There's no way to know what else is down there but to keep digging. And even if there's nothing, at the very least, I'll get the rocks.

 

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[robertk]

More cellar excavating -- very slow going with me being careful about it, plus didn't get to it for a couple of days. But Anyway, the latest find is another piece of the stove. This one has some embossing that might actually identify it, but I've not found any matches yet. Here's the piece

:

That little thing to the left of it looks like a pot lid lifter, which also came out of the cellar hole. The stove part looks like maybe a door or cover plate, and has four lines of text. The top line appears to be "STANDA", so I'm guessing "STANDARD", but the remaining three lines are unreadable. I tried searching the "standard cast iron wood stove", but apparently that matches just about every stove ever made, because I got a ton or matches that aren't it. The closest match that I saw was a "step" style cookstove, which had a door similar to this on the "step" part of the stove, but it was some other manufacture and wasn't a great match. But it was the only one where the vent holes were at the top of the door rather than the bottom.

Does anyone recognize the stove company, or recognize what the rest of the text might say?

 

[robertk]

I'm still digging out that cellar hole. The more I dig, the faster it gets, because the deeper I go, the bigger the rocks, and the wider the hole, the easier it is to get them out. It's deep enough I can comfortably put my legs in there, using the earth as a chair to work. It's really amazing how much rock and how little dirt is in there, and we had no idea it was even there.

Anyway, no more stove parts yet, but I did hit a layer last night where pretty much every rock had rust on the bottom of it. I pulled out a bunch of barbed wire and a few nails, a crumpled piece of pewter or something, and the top of a small broken bottle (just the neck, no other glass around it, at least not that I can see yet).

I looked up the barbed wire and the closest match I could find was patented in 1879, which sounds about right based on everything else I've been finding. Still no coins though.



Pictures don't do the hole, or the rocks, justice. The white thing I have the rocks in won't be nearly big enough, as it's already full and I'm just getting started. The ring of rocks on the ground in the background is the hole where I found the well, and where I'm standing to take the picture, the cellar is just behind me. Probably less than twenty feet from well to cellar.

I'll keep going.

 

[robertk]

Work continues on the cellar excavation. Slow going the last few days for lack of time, but still making progress. Last night I found a small glass fragment that must have been from a plate or tray or something. Clear glass, with a round edge, some decorative cut angles, and a flat part. There were also quite a few more barbed wire fragments, a few pieces of "sheet metal" iron that was pretty thin and brittle. And a couple of iron things that I don't know what they are. I'm guessing hitch parts or something?



Still hoping for something a little better, but all this stuff is still quite interesting.

 

[sibbley]

Really enjoying your journal.

 

[robertk]

Another short dig last night. Quite a bit more barbed wire and "sheet metal" iron. Just flat iron that is very thin (maybe 1/16 of an inch or so) and just flakes apart when you mess with it. But I did find two interesting things. One is half of what looks like a plate or maybe a pie tin. If it were flattened back out, it would be round, and it has a rolled edge and a rim or ridge line on the inside. I don't know what kind of metal it is, but it isn't iron.



The other thing I found is a fairly good sized piece of thin iron that is at the current bottom of the hole. I don't know if it's just a random piece of metal with an air space under it, or what, but scraping the dirt off the top of it definitely sounds hollow. The trouble is, it's at the limit of my reach without actually getting down in the hole, and without knowing how hollow it actually is under there, I'm not wanting to stand on it. So I guess I need to widen the hole first so there's more room for me to get down in there. There are still packed rocks in every direction, so that may take a bit of work. The good news is, even with just finding junk so far, it's still interesting, and my wife is still interested, despite me digging an ever larger hole in the yard.

I got some Evaporust to try to clean up that stove part that has the lettering on it, so maybe I can get an ID on it. I will start that today.

 

[robertk]

Not much noteworthy last night in the iron mine (cellar hole). In addition to the usual pile of rocks, I pulled out an entire bucket full of pieces of barbed wire and "sheet iron". I also found a few random pieces of broken glass, pottery shards, and a piece of a mason jar lid. I thought it was going to rain on me, but it never did. The sky was incredible though.

 

[robertk]

In addition to the barbwire, sheet metal, and rocks, a couple of interesting things came out of the hole last night. Neither is valuable, just interesting. First, there is a little round rock that looks like maybe a marble? It appears to be sandstone, half an inch diameter, and almost spherical. I've never seen a rock like this before. Could this be a marble? Some other use? Or just a neat little rock?



Then there was a bottle fragment that has enough writing to identify. Too bad it wasn't the whole bottle -- that would have been nice.


It is a bottle from the "Ballard Snow Liniment Company" of St. Louis. That company formed in 1882 and apparently made Mr. Ballard quite a fortune. The liniment apparently was largely turpentine and horseradish oil. There's no telling what effect that had on your health, but I bet it tasted positively horrible.

 

[robertk]

No digging tonight, too much other stuff to do. But I've got quite the box of barb wire and sheet metal going that I've pulled out of the hole, and there's still a lot more down there. Last night I found some more pottery shards, a tin can lid of some sort (about the size of a coffee can lid, with a small ring handle in the center), and some bits of glass and charred wood. Barely getting started....

In the meantime, I got some Evaporust and put the stove door in it to see if I could get enough rust off to read it -- and I did. Here's what I see so far:



That pretty clearly says this:
I.
STANDA
18
M&E G
ST. LOU

So I'm guessing it's a "STANDARD" stove by a company in St. Louis Missouri that was named "M & E" something, with a model number 18-something. Unfortunately, even with that knowledge, my internet searching has been fruitless. Does it ring any bells?

 

[CanSlawKing]

Maybe a decent chance that stove came from American Stove Company or one of their subsidiaries (like Ringen):

American Stove Company

The American Stove Company was founded in 1901 by Charles A. Stockstrom in St. Louis, Missouri. Its industry was stoves and its headquarters is in Wood Dale, Illinois. In 1957, it merged with the Food Giant Markets of California. In 1958, it was sold to Dixie Products. It was sold to the Maytag...

mycompanies.fandom.com

Interesting history of that company:

1925: The Real Hot Stove League - Lafayette Square Archives

The real hot stove league is one that warms your cockles by the fire between seasons. Here's a literal take on the subject.

lafayettesquarearchives.com

 

[robertk]

Maybe a decent chance that stove came from American Stove Company or one of their subsidiaries (like Ringen):

Could be. Maybe I'll find the other half of it so I can get the rest of the name. But from what I can tell, there were a lot of different companies in the mid to late 1800s, operating under a lot of different names, and many of them didn't last long. So it's really a challenge. I did find the smaller stove door earlier that had an "M" visible -- maybe there will be more if I get the rust off that piece.

 

[robertk]

A little more excavation last night -- another bucket full of barbed wire and sheet metal. Also found a nice slab of "little brown jug" pottery, and two bottle fragments. The smaller one is identifiable -- it has "PEARL" embossed on the bottom. It looks to me like the letters have a slight backward slant to them, which would mean the bottle was made by the Sheldon Foster Glass Company, 1900 to 1907. Or at least so say the old bottle maker's mark reference I found on the Historic Glass Bottle website. It is interesting that all three of the bottles/fragments I've found so far appear to be medicine bottles.

We also finally got a little rain last night, just over eight tenths of an inch, so the hole is a bit muddy today. I may do some regular yard digging or something tonight and let it dry a bit. More rain is forecast for the next few days, and I hope we get it. We really need it.

 

[robertk]

Some random stuff from last night. These were just some easy targets in the yard, not in the cellar hole. More of the usual iron stuff -- railroad spike, square nut, possibly more stove pieces, etc. There's also a small (.22) bullet, a bunch of small pieces of brass that were all in the same square foot or so area, and the most interesting find of the day -- a small wheel.



I don't know what the wheel would have went to -- a toy, maybe? It's about the right size to be a roller skate wheel, but I don't think those were a thing in 1880. It's got a convex rolling edge, so it wouldn't be a pulley (belt would just slip right off), and the axle is too thin to be for anything heavy. So I don't know what it went to. Seems more or less identical on both sides. Here is one side, and standing on edge.


The small pile of brass pieces was interesting to swing over. The whole area where it was scattered was just a hair bigger than the coil, yet I got a bunch of distinct signals when swinging over it. I was surprised the signals separated that well.

 

[robertk]

Last night I decided to dig out the well a bit more, since we want to put a wishing well there, and it will need to be wider and a little deeper to give it a solid foundation. But the more I dig, the more I think maybe I'm wrong about it being a well.

The depression you mentioned filled with rocks might be a filled in outhouse. If so that’s where your bottles would be found.

The well wasn't a depression when I started (the depression is the cellar hole). But the round ring of rocks around the pipe with a stone cap made me think "well". But there was one thing that bugged me -- the cap stone was under the pipe - like it was in there upside down. That and the fact that there was not more pipe under it (if it was a drilled well, it would have pipe much further, I would think).

So last night I was digging it out more, and it occurred to me that maybe the rocks being in a ring around it was just because the pipe was round. So maybe the ring of rocks was a coincidence. As I dig to widen the hole, I'm still finding a lot more rocks, so I can't say for sure yet what the outermost shape is. But what I can say is this. There are lots of bottle fragments.

I found that one intact bottle here, and now I've found fragments of at least four more. There isn't enough for me to identify the maker or years, but there are four different neck types, all very interesting.




So with all these bottles, I'm wondering if maybe @ToddsPoint 's comment applies and this might not be a well at all, but an outhouse? How would I know? The thing that makes this different from the cellar hole is that the rocks seem to go out rather than down -- the center part of the hole seems to be just dirt. If it's an outhouse, how deep would it be? How would I know I was at the bottom? I''ll know I'm at the edges when I run out of rocks, but the depth, I don't know?

 

[ToddsPoint]

I’ve never dug one so don’t really know what the average depth is. You’re already hitting old bottles! Keep going and see what’s down there. When you find that first unbroken old bottle you’ll be hooked.😎

 

[robertk]

When you find that first unbroken old bottle you’ll be hooked.

Oh I'm already hooked.

I found three more bottle necks last night, more heavily damaged than the others, but still interesting. Found a jar lid that was almost intact. Also found a metal box slightly smaller than a cigar box. It seemed like I might get it out intact, but unfortunately it was too corroded and fell apart when I finally got it free and picked It up. Also found a couple more pieces of what looks like D-shaped pipe. I have no idea what that's for.

I know all this stuff so far is just junk, but it's still fascinating to me.



That third pic is the largest piece of the metal box that remained after it fell apart. Unfortunately there was nothing in it but dirt. And the last one is the D-shaped pipe. It's about the size of my fingers.

The deer don't seem to know what to make of me sitting there on the ground scratching at the dirt.

 

[ToddsPoint]

The fact that you are finding older bottles close to the surface is a good sign. I don’t see any screw tops. Usually older is deeper so you might start hitting some good stuff as you go down. Awesome spot!

 

[robertk]

Digging was super slow last night because there were glass shards everywhere. You can't tell what's good and what's not until you get it out, though, so it's slow going.

Anyway, I got a whole bunch of shards (probably the bodies to all the necks I found), only two of them identifiable. First is a semi-intact mason jar lid with a porcelain liner that says "Boyd's Genuine Porcelain Lined", with the N's backwards. From what I could find online the backwards N's is a mold tooling error, which wasn't terribly uncommon. Apparently there's no easy way to date it, but I'm guessing mid 1880's, to match other things I've found there.


The other piece is the bottom of a bottle with a patent date on it -- April 1, '84, which I presume is 1884. I did a patent search for that date and found a patent for a bottle design by one J. K. Cummings, of St. Louis, Missouri. That date and location are consistent with other things I've found, so I think that's probably it. No idea of what the contents were though.


Still waiting to find a whole one.

 

[ToddsPoint]

Can’t wait to see that first complete bottle!

 

[robertk]

Here's the drawing from the patent and the fragments of bottle I have that match it. The neck is a little different but the overall shape is the same (and that's what the patent actually covers, the shape).