The bottle story starts with my dogs. I have two of 'em. 

They're big. Large breeds. Together, they weigh around 200 pounds. They eat a lot, and, needless to say, I have to be vigilant with the poop pickin' up. Every couple days I'll walk a couple laps around the yard, shovel in hand, and do what I gotta do. 

Because of the slow walk, every now and then I'll inadvertently tap the shovel on ground -- like one would with a walkin' stick. And every now and then, that action will result in an audible "clink". Why? Because there is an endless supply of junk, mostly of the masonry variety, not too far beneath the surface. Maybe this is why grass won't ever grow.  

So...last weekend I was making the rounds, carefully looking for glass and poop, and while scooping something up I heard a "clink". This happened in the somewhat mysterious northeast corner of the yard by a big oak tree so I decided to start diggin'. Per usual, I found a lot of buried brick and limestone.     ​

Near the house, this isn't an uncommon find. Brick and limestone got chiseled on site during original construction and there weren't any trash trucks coming around in 1878 to haul away the offcuts. Burying the scraps was the easiest means of disposal. 

But this location is about as far from the house -- a few feet from the alley -- as one can get in my yard. When I moved in 5 years ago, after clearing enough brush, I realized there was an aluminum shed back there.

I tore it down and discovered some sort of manmade structure beneath it, and plenty of scrap brick and limestone chunks buried beneath that.

Long story short, I have found a LOT of buried masonry in this part of the yard. I'd understand the offcut thing -- build the retaining wall (it's brick, although not 1878 brick) along the alley in the 1910s or 1920s or 1930s, backfill it with scraps, bury it all, move on. But some of the stuff has mortar on it, which means it's not all offcuts; it's brick and limestone that had been a structure, somewhere, at some time. On my property? Who knows. 

Anyhow...while digging last weekend, I would up pulling out a decently large piece of curvy, amber glass. It was maybe a foot down. Then I found a piece that matched up with first piece I'd pulled out. At this point I could tell that I'd unearthed parts of a glass bottle. I proceeded to find additional parts of the bottle -- all caked with mud -- and slowly realized it had probably been a full, intact bottle...before I started digging. 

I took the glass in the house -- I didn't find all the parts of the bottle, didn't have enough gas in the tank -- and cleaned off the mud. No markings, aside from 1 piece: the bottom.

And then...the research was on. At first I thought the embossing was "BC Co", but the internet quickly led me to realize that it's actually "BG Co". Know what that means? 

Belleville Glass Company, which I was able to discern by matching the embossing on the glass I found with pics of bottles confirmed to have been made by them. 

Belleville Glass Co. (Belleville, IL) was only around for about 4 years, 1882-1886. The company made beer and soda bottles, flasks, fruit jars, and druggists vials; in its early days, the glass factory employed around 100 people and produced over 14,000 bottles a day. 

That's the bottle story. What are the odds of finding a bottle, buried a foot down, that's 140ish years old and may have contained Lemp's beer at one time, made by a company that was only in operation for 4 years? 

I can't figure out how the bottle wound up where it did. Around the time of the bottle's production, my house, several years old, was still the only structure on the entire block, and the streets and alleys had already been laid out, if not entirely built.

It wasn't buried in the yard by the original home builders (too early). It wasn't, I don't think, put there by the retaining wall builders (too late). Maybe there was a trash pit in the back corner of the yard in the late 19th century? 

Who knows. But...with all the glass I continue to find, and pottery shards, and pennies, and miscellaneous stuff...I really feel like, somewhere on the property, there's a buried trash pile somewhere. Someday, maybe I'll get lucky enough to find it.    

**Research:
sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/BellevilleGlassCo.pdf
sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/AdolphusBusch.pdf

I haven't worked on the house much lately -- it's been too cold outside to do much out there, and inside, I've done a lot of unremarkable, miscellaneous odds and ends.

But I did get to see an old foundation while I was downtown last weekend, which I always kind of nerd out over. 

I was downtown last Saturday to run in the annual St. Patrick's Day 5-mile run, which one of my brothers and I have participated in for quite a few years. He cooked me this year (I got him last year), but for an old guy like myself, I did OK -- 5th out of 84 in my age group. 

After the run, which was a complete struggle, and a couple post-run drinks, which were not a complete struggle, I walked back to my truck, which I'd parked over by 10th and Olive. While walking past the Wainwright Building, I noticed a bunch of holes in the sidewalk. 

At that time, the mostly vacant buildings in what was once known as the garment district were undergoing a conversion to residential lofts. As part of the construction, the streets had to be torn up to rework utilities to those buildings. In several spots, this offered an opportunity to see the street cross section and all the layers of street that had come before the modern asphalt, including the brick and cobblestone streets, as well as old street car tracks. 

So now, anytime I'm downtown and there's a hole in the ground, I check it out to see if there's anything interesting buried under the surface. 

It's hard to say what this old foundation was a part of. The 1876 map shows a small, 2-story building in the area of the foundation in question:

This building was replaced in the 1890s by the DeMinel Building, which was built shortly after construction of it's famous neighbor, the Wainwright Building. Here's the DeMinel Building, front and center (Wainwright is just behind it, to the left):

The foundation I saw was, approximately, here, just north of the alley between the two buildings:

The DeMinel Building was torn down in 1976 and replaced by some low-rise garbage. 

It's hard to say which building that foundation may have been a part of, but in either case, I got to see something that probably hasn't been seen too many times since the 19th century. It's just some old limestone and mortar, but still a pretty neat find for a civil engineer that has a strong fascination with St. Louis history.  

I spend a lot of time in the basement. It's where I have the wood shop set up, it's where I do laundry, and it's where I clean about once a year when the sewer lateral gets clogged with roots and the system backs up. 

​I gutted the basement in 2020, tearing out 2 layers of "finish": a lot of remnants from the original construction in 1878, and then a more modern (1980s?) iteration.

One of the byproducts of this effort was a LOT of holes left in the floor. Some of the holes were where the floor had been busted up to run plumbing for a basement bathroom (again, 1980s?).

Some of the holes were the remnants of old-timey construction. The basement has 2 layers of concrete floor, the original and then an early 20th century addition (the granitoid stuff); the bottom plates of the wood-framed walls, of which there are only a couple, were buried in at least 1 of those layers. 

Wood buried in concrete, especially below grade, isn't going to last forever and the door jamb shown above - with 2x4 wood framing between it and the limestone and plaster - is no exception. Removing that door jamb 4 years ago left me with a couple of these guys:

I've got these voids scattered all over the basement and while there are more critical holes to fill - I routinely step in a big hole over by my table saw, they make it tough to use certain spaces of the basement efficiently, and on more than 1 occasion I've seen mice scampering through them like it's their own little tunnel system - because I have almost no experience finishing concrete, I figured I'd start in a small, discreet place. 

Also, after sizing up the void I'd originally planned to fill, I realized I probably hadn't bought enough concrete. 

So...I cleaned all the dust and loose rock and mortar out of this cavity.

In the process, I realized that the void wrapped around the corner of the limestone wall and traveled some distance under the concrete floor. Due to limited reach and zero visibility I couldn't tell just how far the void went, so I pulled out as much debris as I could reach and called it good.

Those little bits of wood, those are remnants of wall framing from 1878.

I managed to remove a softball size chunk of the original concrete floor. I have no idea what went into the old concrete or what the mix was, but it seems real aggregate-y and sort of brittle, like the cement used wasn't real good (by today's standards) or maybe it just wasn't mixed real well. 

Once I got everything free of loose material, I wadded up some builder's paper (the big rolls of brown paper you can get at the big box stores) and stuffed it into the tunnel. I didn't want to start placing concrete and, in the event that the tunnel stretched further than I thought it did, have it all leak out into who knows where. 

The void, particularly the tunnel, was close to 8 inches deep, which worked out in my favor because it allowed me to add some rock as a base. For a space this small it's probably inconsequential, but a compacted - as much as I could compact it, anyhow - rock base is better for the concrete to sit on than dirt. 

I mixed up a bag of concrete, which was WAY more than I needed but concrete is cheap and mixing up a half bag is rolling the dice a little bit because you may wind up getting weird proportions of aggregate and cement. I dumped the fresh concrete in the hole and admired my work. 

I pushed as much back into the tunnel as I could, but concrete isn't a super flowable material and agitating it is necessary to get it in all the nooks and crannies, especially those that can't be reached with any type of tool. To accomplish the required vibration I duct taped a thin scrap of wood to the end of a junk oscillating saw blade, stuck it into the concrete, and ran it at low speeds - only a second or two at a time - in a number of locations.  

I'd share a vid of the DIY concrete vibrator making the concrete level drop - that's how you can tell it's working - but the vid I shot, with my phone in my hand, looks like I'm having a medical emergency. You'll just have to use your imagination. 

Once I was convinced that the concrete had traveled to all the below grade places I needed it to get to, I screeded everything as flat as I could get it (the floor is a little wavy right here) and then came the hardest part...waiting. 

This part of the process is the toughest, I think, for people that don't finish concrete every day: wait too long and it's tough to finish the concrete surface, don't wait long enough and you're gonna be dealing with a soupy mess.  

I'll preface the rest of this by saying that after finishing up some repointing work the day before, I left my small trowel in the bucket of mortar and forget to empty the bucket or clean the trowel. I did my best to scrape and sand off as much as I could but I ultimately wound up grabbing my big trowel, which is wider than the void, and going for it. 

For a guy that doesn't do this very often, the end result is perfectly acceptable. There are a few spots I wish I could have gotten a little better, but the only trowel at my disposal was literally too big to fit into some of the corners and between that and the unevenness of the floor right there...it is what it is.  

I probably worked the concrete a couple minutes more than I should have, but it was a good learning experience and now I know that I need to 1, have the right sized trowel(s) for the job and 2, do a better job of cleaning up the edges of the existing floor to give myself a decent shot at a good transition from new concrete to existing. 

Oh, and 3, unless I want a bunch of dog hair in the concrete (there's horse hair in the plaster, so maybe it's fitting?), I need to clean myself off better after running around the yard with the dogs. 

Up next is the corresponding void on the other side of the doorway:

Act like you don't see that mousetrap. 😏