Our home is a charming, albeit creaky, old log house, featuring grand square beams, winding staircases, and a stately double stone fireplace. Despite its picturesque setting at the base of three hills, it’s surprisingly drafty, with dust gently sifting through its ancient ceilings. This rustic abode, located on a now-forgotten county road, has been a home to just two families since 1941.
This isn’t your typical modern residence; it’s a testament to the resilience of the men and women who constructed it in this remote corner of western Pennsylvania, long before my family arrived in 1988. I often reflect on their hard work and the challenging era they lived in, feeling immense gratitude for the legacy they left behind.
For years, a central mystery has lingered: the exact origin and construction date of our house. We’ve always guessed around 1860, but concrete proof eluded us. My search led me through county records back to 1913, only to find a vague 1964 tax assessment labeling it an ‘old, remodeled house.’ Conversations with log house specialists and local historians, even dating our apple trees to the mid-1800s, yielded no definitive answers.
However, the truth finally emerged from an unexpected source.
One evening, I enlisted the help of Tom and Pat Baker, a husband-and-wife archaeology team. Over the past 37 years, I’ve collected countless random objects scattered across our fields and through the forests: fragments of pottery and glass, rusty iron tools, pieces of farm equipment, shotgun and oyster shells, animal bones—and, inevitably, a fair amount of plastic. They were there to help me identify these forgotten treasures.
While part of my motivation was simply to clear the land, these objects also served as tangible clues, whispering tales of previous inhabitants: their daily lives, farming practices, diets, tools, and even the industrial landscape of the past. My collection isn’t extraordinary – despite our proximity to a French and Indian War frontier, I’ve never stumbled upon a musket ball or an arrowhead. And honestly, while ‘artifacts’ sounds grand, most of what I’ve unearthed is, quite frankly, old rubbish.
In early rural America, organized garbage collection was non-existent. Settlers would dispose of their refuse in various ways: dumping it into pits near summer kitchens, using privies, creating bottle dumps, burning it, or even tossing it into pigsties. As archaeologist Tom explained, ‘People would also spread waste products over their fields using a manure spreader.’
My field excursions have yielded a diverse range of finds: a ceramic smoking pipe, likely dating to 1895; the twisted remnants of a shoe’s wooden and metal heel; and, surprisingly, a piece of opaque white milk glass unearthed from a compost pile. Pat, one of the archaeologists, remarked on its rarity, noting that a milk glass manufacturer, the Westmoreland Glass Company, was established just a few towns away in 1889.
During a hike last year, I discovered a pitted, brown rock on a path, initially suspecting it might be a meteorite. To my surprise, it was a piece of slag.
Tom inquired if an iron furnace had once operated on the property, a common feature in this valley, though I had no record of one here. While an 1876 map showed a tannery and blacksmith shop nearby, Pat clarified that the slag couldn’t have come from either. ‘That piece of slag indicates iron smelting,’ she explained, ‘and would have originated from nearby coke ovens or an actual iron furnace.’
Under the archaeologists’ discerning eyes, seemingly ordinary glass fragments gained new life. A clear shard bearing raised numbers and letters was identified as part of a drugstore bottle, complete with its name and address. A delicate seam along the neck of a pale blue bottle suggested it was handblown into a mold during the mid-to-late 1800s. A piece of brown glass was recognized as a fragment of a 1930s Clorox bottle—a shade chosen, I learned, to prevent light from degrading its chemicals and signal its poisonous contents.
My collection also included a wealth of redware and stoneware, the common pottery once used in this old home. While most stoneware pieces were simply glazed brown and white, one stood out with a distinct blue sponge pattern, likely from the early 1900s. Another intriguing find was a fragment of flow-blue refined earthenware, dating from approximately 1840 to 1900, which Pat meticulously reassembled from three burned pieces, much like solving a historical puzzle.
Then came the breakthrough: Pat pinpointed the property’s earliest occupation not by what we found, but by what was missing. ‘Your collection entirely lacks delftware, creamware, and pearlware,’ she revealed, referring to pottery styles prevalent in North America from colonial times through the mid-1800s. ‘This strongly suggests your property wasn’t settled until the mid-1850s.’ While the original builders remain anonymous, this is the most precise dating I’ve achieved for our home.
Further supporting her dating, an abundance of wire nails among my metal finds corroborated the timeline. My collection of metal objects includes half a pair of hay or ice tongs, a double-bit axe, what could be an ox shoe, a vise, and various hooks, screws, nuts, and bolts. Since wire nails weren’t mass-produced until 1857, their presence further reinforces that the house was likely not inhabited before that period.
However, not every item I collected was discarded waste. Many were simply lost, misplaced, or accidentally dropped. As Tom aptly put it, ‘They wouldn’t have noticed something falling off a saddle if they were riding horseback.’
Even today, we are unintentionally contributing to the environmental scatter. I’ve personally dropped plant tags, terra cotta fragments, and rubber bands. Tools frequently slip from our ATV or pockets, and machinery breaks down in the fields. After hikes, I often return with unintended souvenirs like electric fence insulators, lawn mower wheels, chains from a manure spreader, and bungee cords. Occasionally, I get fortunate, and the found item is exactly what we needed to repair machinery or replace a lost horseshoe.
However, our contributions are accidental. Unfortunately, not everyone shares this ethos. Tom observed, ‘Today, people often just find a ravine and use it as a dumping ground,’ a practice starkly evident in a neglected corner of our farm. Someone is habitually tossing carloads of trash over a guardrail into a ravine – not just typical household refuse, but hundreds of beer cans crammed into bright red plastic bags. One such bag now dangles from a maple sapling, an unsightly, giant red ornament.
Adding to the problem, our county lacks a plastic bag ban, and these ubiquitous bags are freely distributed at convenience stores, gas stations, and grocery outlets.
Though I rarely drive that particular route, I frequently encounter the roadside litter during my bike rides. My journey involves a challenging seven-mile ascent through steep hills with hairpin turns in the Allegheny Mountains, eventually leading down to a flat stretch alongside fields of freshly cut hay and a sheep farm, often graced by the sight of a leucistic hawk. The route also skirts forests where I forage for morels and black raspberries, and passes a pond where a colossal snapping turtle basks in the sun.
During one cleanup effort, I collected nearly a hundred discarded items, including soda, water, and liquor bottles, French fry containers, oversized beverage cups, lottery tickets, straws, plastic tubs, energy drink cans, and disturbingly, two containers of hypodermic needles. I also spotted a diaper in another ravine, frustratingly out of reach.
While I try to empathize with the challenges of a small township that still lacks municipal trash collection—understanding that waste disposal incurs costs—my patience wears thin when encountering the synthetic stuffing of an entire couch, discarded packaging from morning-after pills, and an abandoned air purifier halfway down a ravine.
This rampant dumping persists despite strict laws, hefty fines, and the possibility of community service. Yet, without proper enforcement, the financial incentive to avoid proper disposal often overrides the legal deterrent.
My mind often wanders to the grim reality of wildlife navigating this human-made mess: black bears, opossums, raccoons, and coyotes risking injury from broken glass in streams, or traversing steep slopes littered with sharp, rusty metal. I envision birds scavenging through fast-food wrappers and chipmunks gnawing on plastic containers. This detritus doesn’t just mar the landscape; it actively contaminates our air, water, and soil, impeding the natural growth of indigenous plant life, with vast quantities of plastic inevitably flowing downstream.
This raises a chilling question: Are these discarded remnants—this overwhelming tide of modern waste—destined to become the archaeology of the future, the primary ‘artifacts’ for coming generations to analyze and interpret?
What stories will these future ‘artifacts’ narrate about our society, our values, and our collective impact on the planet?
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot’s collection of essays, “A Farm Life: Observations From Fields and Forests,” was published by Stackpole Books.