several chicago fire era bottles, fragments and an incredibly well-built circular wood floor privy discovered this week

i was notified early on in the day to quickly head to an excavation site (the two story wood frame house had been demolished a week prior), that looked promising for unearthing bottles and other discarded household wares dating to the early 1870's.

sure enough when i arrived onsite, the machine operator was punching through the ground with his bucket and nearly every pile of disturbed  earth contained a nice array of remnants left behind by 19th century chicagoans.

the earliest find was a very well-maintained and richly colored cobalt blue john a. lomax soda or mineral bottle with a nice strike and smooth base with embossed initials. based on the 14 & 16 charles street address, the bottle was fabricated between 1870-1872. nearby and a few feet above the lomax bottle i found a hayes brother hutchinson blobtop with the distinctive horseshoe logo.

as the day wore on there wasn't much activity: a pottery shard here and an animal bone there, but not much besides piles of dirt being trucked off on an hourly basis. the course of events changed dramatically when a region containing black sludge and stench was found. i was thinking a privy vault or pit was about to be uncovered and a few minutes later, there it was, intact and littered with scattered rubbish.

the privy pit did not contain staves or hoops. rather, this one was circular and outlined in common brick. perhaps the most important feature was the floor, which consisted of very thick yellow pine wood boards interlocked with tongue and groove joints. of the 15 or so privy floors i have found (all with circular wooden floors) over the last year, this was only the second one found bearing these characteristics of thickness and joinery. the other, found less than a mile away from the john kent russell house (1855), contained an even thicker floor with tongue and groove joints, staves and riveted wrought iron hoops.

as for the contents of this privy, i found three nearly identical aqua blue james stenson soda and/or mineral water bottles, a partial hayes soda bottle (the bottles were fabricated by alexander and david h. chambers of pittsburgh, pa.), and perhaps most importantly, a "torpedo" or round bottom "medicated aerated water" bottles by john a. lomax. these blobtop bottles do not surface often and are noted for their impressive "color run" (i.e., were produced in a variety of colors). i had never seen this unusual golden yellow amber color before, so i was very pleased with my find. the blobtop was free from chips, often caused from users attacking the corks with ice-picks to drink the beverage. additionally, the deeply embossed vertical lettering along the sides of the bottle was very clear and clean.

i was surprised that additional bottles and glassware were not found around these bottles, but perhaps the privy was "dipped" a time or two by a night scavenger, employed by the home owner to clean out their privies when they were full and/or the stench unbearable. aside from the lack of additional contents, i was very much satisfied with these discoveries and the condition of the artifacts. the well-built privy floor was no doubt a bonus.

additional photos added on 10-23-2015:

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