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A few Trasks were found!

A friend and I when out looking for outhouse pits recently. He had been telling me about this one town where he felt there had to be good stuff in the privies. This town had a railroad that came thru fairly early, it was a town of over 3000 by 1850, and many of the old buildings are still there! Well after a year or so of hearing him tell me about this place we decided to actually go to this small town near Oshkosh Wis. The Weather Channel was predicting rain that day but not until mid afternoon. So we go an early start and by a bit after 8:00 we arrived in town. Before I could get the probes out my hunting buddy had already jumped out of the car and was talking to someone. We all talked for a bit but eventully the owner gave us permission to probe! After just a few minutes of poking that sandy soil I found the first pit. Then a few more pokes and the second one was discovered. Then a few more and the third one was found! We now had a place to dig!!! All the pits were only 4 1/2 feet deep and the sandy soil made for easy digging.

The first pit only produced a few bottles. The best bottle from that first pit was a Reiter Hutch from Milwaukee with a Wis Glass marking on the base. Well we closed up that first pit and hoped the second one would be better. After we had the grass back like it was when we started we opened the second pit. This one was different. Within the top 6-8 inches we found a Trasks Magnetic Ointment. Not a rare bottle but a nice find. As we dug, more and more of these little 3 inch Trasks came out. By the time we had gotten to the middle of the pit we had well over 50 of these little bottles. They were comming out 2, 3, 4, even 5 at a time! This was unusual! I had never dug so many of the same bottle in the same pit before. By the time we were done with that second pit I counted over 180 of these little jems. Almost every shovel full came up with another one or two. At one point I sat in the pit and tossed up about two dozen of them one after another. These weren't the only items we found but they were the most numerous!

Before we had finished that second pit the neighbor from the house to our east came over to see what we were up to and within a short time we had permission to do his yard. I gave it a quick probe and found one pit in his yard. As we continued to dug yet another neighbor came up to us and asked, What ya doing? digging for gold? Well we talked to him for a while and showed him some of our finds and before long ended up getting permission to stop by his house to look for his pit. We did stop there later and found one more pit. However on the way to his house I stopped at the wrong house by mistake and ended up talking to another person who said sure, his back yard was available. I liked these folks! What a nice town!

We could see the rain clouds comming in by this time so we didn't get a chance to do all of these pits but we now have at least 4 more pits waiting for our return. The rain did start within a short time after we had gotten back in the car and although the rain did cut our day short we had no shortage of treasures for out efforts. Below are some of our treasures we found.