We live in an old log house with big square beams, twisted staircases and a double stone fireplace. The floor boards creak, dust falls through the ceilings and the house is drafty, despite having been built at the bottom of three hills out of the wind. It sits on a county road, now abandoned, and, since 1941, has been occupied by only two families.
It is a type of house few live in anymore, built by hardworking women and men who came to this western Pennsylvania outpost in much harder times, many years before we arrived here in 1988. I am grateful they did.
But who built this house, and when? We’ve assumed it’s from roughly 1860. But we’ve never been sure, and finding out has not been easy. Our county recorder of deeds got me as far back as 1913. A 1964 tax assessment read, “old, remodeled house.” I’ve spoken to a log house expert, a local historian, and dated our apple trees to the mid-19th century, but still I’ve come up short.
Then I found my answer by means I didn’t expect.
I invited two archaeologists, Tom and Pat Baker, a husband and wife team, to the barn one night to help me identify the random objects I’ve found scattered across the fields and forests over 37 years: pottery shards, bits of glass, iron tools, farm equipment, shotgun shells, oyster shells, animal bones. And, of course, plastic.
I gathered up these artifacts to clean up the land, but also to give me clues about those who came before us: how they lived and farmed, what they ate and drank, the utensils they used, the area’s industrial past. Mine is a commonplace collection; despite living in a town on the Pennsylvania frontier where the French and Indian War was fought, I’ve never found a musket ball or an arrowhead. And while I may use a fancy word and call these items artifacts, the truth is, much of what I have found was probably trash.
Settlers in rural America had no garbage collection, so they threw rubbish into pits outside summer kitchens. Or into privies or bottle dumps. They burned trash or tossed it into a pigsty. “People put waste products into a manure spreader and spread it over the fields,” Tom said.
Out in the field, I’ve picked up a ceramic smoking pipe, quite likely from 1895, the mangled wood and metal heel of a shoe, and, turning the compost pile, I found a white, opaque piece of milk glass. “I rarely see that,” Pat said. It turned out that a couple of towns over, a manufacturer of milk glass, the Westmoreland Glass Company, was founded in 1889.
Last year on a hike, I found a pitted, brown rock in the middle of a path. I thought it might be a meteorite. It turned out to be a piece of slag.
Had an iron furnace been on the property, Tom asked? Iron furnaces are abundant in this valley, but not here, at least to my knowledge. I know from an 1876 map that a tannery and a blacksmith shop were close by, but the slag, according to Pat, wouldn’t have originated in either of those places. “That piece of slag is indicative of iron smelting and would have come from nearby coke ovens or an iron furnace,” she said.
Nondescript pieces of glass suddenly come alive when archaeologists look at them. A clear shard with raised numbers and letters turned out to be a bottle embossed with a drugstore’s name and address. A seam running along the neck of a pale blue bottle indicated it was handblown into a mold in the mid-to-late 1800s. A piece of brown glass was part of an old Clorox bottle from the 1930s. Brown glass, I learned, kept light from altering the chemicals and indicated that the contents were poisonous.
I found an abundance of redware and stoneware, the everyday pottery used in this old house. Most of the stoneware was glazed brown and white, but one piece had a blue sponge pattern, probably from the early 1900s. A fragment of flow-blue refined earthenware, from about 1840 to 1900, had split into three from being burned. Pat put the plate back together like a puzzle.
And then came the revelation: Pat was able to date this property according to the pottery we didn’t have. “Your collection is completely missing delftware, creamware and pearlware,” she said, listing pottery types that were common in North America from colonial times until the middle of the 1800s. “This tells me that your property was not occupied until the mid-1850s.” I still don’t know who built the house, but that is the closest I’ve come to accurately dating the place.
Wire nails backed up her assertion. I’ve found a lot of metal: half a set of tongs for grabbing hay bales or ice, a double bit ax, what might be an ox shoe, a vise and assorted hooks, screws, nuts, bolts and wire nails. Wire nails were not manufactured until 1857, so that also suggested the house had not been lived in until then.
Not all the items I collected were trash, however. Some were lost, misplaced or dropped. “They didn’t see it fall off a saddle if they were on horseback,” Tom said.
We, too, are guilty of inadvertently leaving items out in the environment. I’ve dropped plant tags, terra cotta shards and rubber bands. Tools fall off our ATV or out of our pockets. Machinery breaks in the field. I’ve come home from hikes with electric fence insulators, lawn mower wheels, chain from a manure spreader and bungee cords. Sometimes, I get lucky and it’s exactly the piece we were looking for and machinery can be fixed or a horseshoe put back on.
But we don’t purposely toss trash into the woods. “Today, people find a ravine and dump it,” Tom said, which is exactly what someone is doing at a deserted corner of the farm. They’re throwing garbage from their car over a guardrail into a ravine. Not only common household trash, but hundreds of beer cans stuffed into red, plastic bags. One now hangs from a maple sapling like a giant red Christmas ornament.
Our county has no plastic bag ban and convenience stores, gas stations and grocery stores hand them out for free.
I seldom drive that road, but noticed the garbage when biking there, seven miles up steep hills with hairpin turns in the Allegheny Mountains, then down onto the flat by fields of cut hay and a sheep farm, where I often see a leucistic hawk. My ride borders woods where I pick morels and black raspberries and an enormous snapping turtle suns itself by a pond.
One day, I collected about a hundred items of trash, including soda, water and liquor bottles, French fry boxes, supersize cups, lottery tickets, straws, plastic tubs, power drink cans and two containers of hypodermic needles. I saw a diaper down a different ravine, but couldn’t reach it.
I try to be understanding because this small township still has no municipal trash collection. It costs money to collect garbage. But I feel less kindly toward the appearance of the synthetic innards of an entire couch, packaging from morning-after pills, and, halfway down the ravine, an air purifier.
All this, despite dumping being illegal, with hefty fines and possible community service. But why pay someone to haul it away if there are no consequences.
I shudder to think of black bears, opossums, raccoons and coyotes drinking from a stream riddled with broken glass and walking steep hillsides covered in rusty, jagged metal. Of birds picking through fast food wrappers and chipmunks nibbling on plastic containers. How the trash contaminates the air, water and soil, and affects the growth of native plants. And all the plastic running downstream.
And I can’t help but wonder: Is this the archaeology of the future, the things we are leaving the next generation to study?
What will those artifacts tell them about us? About us all?
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot’s collection of essays, “A Farm Life: Observations From Fields and Forests,” was published by Stackpole Books.
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