Unusual homestead discoveries?

I have lived in over 20 homes and have not found the mother lode "yet" but hope springs eternal.
So far it's been one victorian noval, ice tongs, hand planer and about 20 empty wooden kraft cheese boxes that I still have not found the perfect thing to do with as of yet.

My dream is to buy a home that has not been touched since the 50's. Wouldn't that be a dream house?

we had a bunch of work done to the foundation of our 1890 barn recently... and found...... a ton of empty booze bottles! pints and half-pints mostly, dating to the 50's & 60's mostly. Milk a cow, have a sip, milk a cow, have another nip.....

I'd be willing to bet the "toy" ended up sold to a museum. Yes, there are museums for that kind of thing. If you still have the books, see if you can find a museum interested in them. A little searching on the web should dig a few up.

As for average stuff, there is an old sandstone foundation at the back of the property, and my dad even did a bit of exploring where he figured the outhouse was. I've wanted to explore/dig, but he filled the foundation (basement) with junk and used to keep all kinds of scrap back there. It would be a heck of a task to try it now.

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Nevermore

When we lived in a 90 year old house, we started renovating it. I ripped down old wallpaper in a bedroom and found someone had a really good time littering the walls with pen scribbed swastikas. Creepy. There were also a couple of DH Loves RG. In the same room, underneath the old carpet, was a wooden square that when you lifted up revealed a metal box...presumably to use as a secret hiding place. We also found several wire coat hangers inside walls and then antenna off an old radio. Several Red Rose figurines in the dirt outside.

When we moved to a 100 year old house (guess we needed older? LOL), the one we are presently in, so far in two years we've found: a stone plaque with many names engraved on it dated 1968, a gold band wedding ring, the largest wrench I've ever seen (at 4 feet high and weighing probably a good 60 pounds), and a few useable things like farm gates. One can only wonder what else we'll find over the years.

BTW, we actually found the daughter of the man who engraved the stone above. She lives a few hours away from us. She was happy that we were offering to give it to a family member, and she will be visiting us in the spring to remove it and place it on her own property. We will let her have a tour of the house and maybe get more history, should be interesting!

Rumour has it that our farm is the hiding place of the first owner's treasure: he hid his valuables from the wartime era. My son is very adamant that we are going to search our entire 90 acres with a metal detector. LOL Old timers also say that the owner (who is a mechanic) that we bought the house from was owed repair bills on a mint car from the 60s and was never repaid, so he dug a hole and buried the car in it. I would not be surprised to find a body in the walls of this place either, there's surely some shady stories we've heard bits and pieces of also.

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"The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese in the trap."

In our kitchen wall, we found a manual from the phone company on how to use your new telephone. It included such gems of advice as "Don't say 'Hello,' because it wastes time. Just state your name, so the caller will know they have the right number."

I always thought it was unusual that our plumber answered the phone with "Walter Barlow here." Once I read the manual, I think I know where he got the idea. He must have gone through life thinking everyone else he called was wrong in how they answered.

We found a young child's hobnail shoe in the floorboards. I instantly wondered how much trouble this child got into over the missing shoe ...

Not our current place but in our last house, we remodeled the bathroom. The old medicine cabinet had a slit in the back of it. Once it was removed and we tore out the wall, we found 50 or more old razorblades. I guess it was common back in the day to dispose of them like this.

We have an old filled in outhouse come on out!
around here the dog keeps digging up old glass & pottery, even some rusty old horse nippers.
I have found old brown glass bleach bottles, brown glass whisky bottle outside and an old krumcake iron in the house.

A friend of ours moved off of an old place that had a swimming pool. The pool was defunct so they started throwing garbage into it, covered it up.
It is now a multi million housing development. I wonder if the contractors saw anything of value.

I'm always out with the metal detector here but haven't found anything earth shattering yet.

Our house was built around 1905. It had no running water or bathroom facilities until around 1990. I think all the good stuff is probably under what's now the bathroom and kitchen. I've found a couple of old ornate silver spoons, a lapel pin of someone who served in the army in the first world war and a few silver dimes and wheat pennies. LOTS of horseshoes and bits of farm equipment.

One very hot day in the summer I'd hunted and hunted and dug up nothing but junk. Decided to go sit on the stairs in the barn to cool off. The chickens were scratching around in the doorway. When I went over to look they'd dug up a little yellow Tootsie Toy car (roadster No2) from the 1930's and a pile of old vinyl records! My son collects vintage toy cars and trucks so he was thrilled to bits with that.

We also have what used to be a general store. From looking at the census records it was in operation in 1910 but is probably older than that. It was operated until 1989. We find lots of old soda bottles. DH has started collecting them. It's very difficult to use the metal detector there though because they used to keep a bottle opener by the counter and the bottle caps would fall into a box. When the box was full old Roscoe the owner would take the box and throw all the bottle caps out the door to fill in the ruts in the driveway! My metal detector goes crazy.

There was also a gristmill in front of the store built around 1840. We can see some of the foundation still. I want to really go over that area good in the spring.

This year I found out where the old outhouse was! Can't wait to start digging.

Someone mentioned hand made walking sticks for a short person. He could have been very bent over. I just heard about an old timer who lived up the mountain here who was so bent his walking sticks were only about 3 ft long.

Pauline

I've rummaged around the old home sites here on the farm but I've never found anything too valuable. My ancestors were usually as poor as Job's turkey so I don't expect to find a stash of gold coins. The place has been inhabited since the late 1830s or there abouts with three separate home sites so it isn't too difficult to find junk around. A little too easy unfortunately.

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Respect The Cactus!

The farm house on our land is long gone.It burned in the early 80's. They just pushed the stuff into the bushes.We have found all sorts of bottles bricks and flat stones.Parts and pieces of stuff without digging.We also find marbles,china pieces,and old bottles all the time.The best find was an old moonshine still down by the spring.We followed the trail of washed up gallon jugs and syrup bottles and found parts and pieces of an old still.Some of the jugs still had liquid in them(thats how we know they were making moonshine).Very popular in this area in the past.Still have not found anything to pay this place off yet

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Chris
http://aberryvinefarm.blogspot.com/

I've found a lot of stuff here. THe most interesting to me was two Civil War letters and a 1927 Sears catalog. I donated the Civil War letters to the local historical society and I look at my Sears catalog quite a bit. I also found the HS diploma of the man that built this house-- it was from 1918 and his college diploma from 1922. THere were stacks of letters from the 1930's that his future wife wrote to him. He saved everything-- he had the receipt from his mothers funeral in 1940's, which I gave to my BIL because his ggrandfather was the funeral director then. He kept a record of how much he spent on materials and hired help while building this house-- interestingly he bought quite a bit of the lumber from my great uncle...

I found a marble footwarmer (used in buggies) I also found a lot of really old hand tools (1800's) that had belonged to his grandfather. THere was old horse tack, a grinding stone, old green glass batteries, an old pull behind plow, milk cans etc. Actually, if you can think of it I've probably found it-- often it's broken, but it's probably here somewhere. I also found the seat out of an old buggy and a whole bunch of chunks of marble. Parts from an old cookstove, fuel jars for kerosene cookstoves and a lot of cast iron cooking pans.

After the original owner died they had a huge auction-- Amish came from all over to buy things so I can only imagine what must have been here. I'm still finding things all the time-- the tops of the barns are still full of mostly junk. but ya never know... the Sears catalog was stashed in a Jeans potato chip box in the top of one of the barns.

I know that he probably hid money in this house, but I have no plans to rip apart the walls so I'll never find it.

Michelle

Found three movie posters from 1916 under the tarpaper at work this fall when we were pulling off the exterior to add insulation. The posters promoted the Iron Claw chapter play series starring Pearl White.

One of the posters; "The Saving of Dan O'Mara," had this great caption under the artwork...a woman & man who have apparently just rescued a kidnapped or stranded woman..."I'm sorry I'm so weary, I ain't et in a couple of days!"

Also have "the Cognac Cask" & the Intervention of Tito.

Anyone know any collectors? I work for a not for profit, so a sale would be nice!

eBay would be an option.

Two rooms of my house dated back to the mid 1940s according to an elderly neighbor. A few years back when I had a friend do a bit of renovation on my bedroom which is one of the rooms of the original cottage, we found newspapers from the early 1930s rolled and used as wall filler.

They were all pretty well rotted, but we spent the rest of that day reading little bits and pieces before we threw the 75 year old confetti away.

A not so antique treasure we found while reflooring one of the rooms of a newer section of my house , we found a hillbilly and shack label Mountain Dew bottle and a couple 60s era pull tabs in the crawlspace. I added that treasure find to my nick nack shelf.

My stepson had never seen pull tabs that came off the can like that. We got a kick out of telling him how we used them for street fighting and the girls made chains out of them o hang like door beads.

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"I didn't have time to slay the dragon. It's on my To Do list!"

Our place isn't old enough either, but we do have a dump from the former farm out back. Rescued some nicely-shaped galvinized rabbit waterers, a bucket with a hole but a nice logo, bits of dishes & crockery. Hereabouts people still find a lot of Indian stuff. Makes you wonder. Those arrowheads, stone knives and such take a fair amount of time to make, just to go tossing them away everywhere. Way too many to just be lost from missed game. Sue

Just remember, swastikas have a very long history and were only associated with National Socialism for a short period of time. For years, it was a good luck symbol, as it represented the 4 Gospels, or Gammas (greek alphabet). I knew a person who found an old postcard from the early 20's with swastikas on them wishing a person luck.

I once found a pile of old buttons in a house. I pitched them because I was 10 years old and didn't know any better. I guess there's a collector for everything.

I've found horse shoes and a horse tie-down (I think). Also lots of junk. When we moved here we had to pick up every spring because things kept working their way out of the ground when the frost came out. I also found a baby spoon and a pink glass vase. I just enjoy the looking.

In cleaning out an old shed here I find a bottle of bean seeds it reads "Beans 1955" and the best thing is that it is in my moms handwriting. 1955 is the year my grandparents bought the land and home we now live in. She passed away and that is mostly why we moved out to the country two years ago.

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http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c9...m/100_0994.jpg

If your finding arrowheads and stone knives everywhere, that is where they actually made them. They probably threw away more than they kept.