Battle Creek Bottle Dump

TO DIG, OR NOT TO DIG

The Battle Creek Bottle Dump- A Brief History

The Battle Creek city dump was in operation from the late 1800s until the late 1930s. It wasn't until after we bought the property in the fall of 2015 that we became aware that it is located under our yard. Aerial photos taken of the area in the late 1930s clearly showed the location of the dump. What it did not show was that the overgrown area near the active dump had, at one time, also been used as a dump. What do you do when you find something interesting buried in your yard? You dig! We began digging the dump area during the last weekend of October 2015, having no idea that we would still be digging ten years later.

The Battle Creek Bottle Dump- A Brief History

ABOUT THE DIG!

For the first two and a half years, we dug primarily with little 19" shovels, and we carried the dirt up out of the hole in five-gallon pails. It was a great exercise, but it limited our progress, and we would eventually take steps to remedy that situation. 2017 brought retirement and the largest find we would keep, a cleated wheel from a steam engine weighing in at 300 pounds. By the end of 2017, we had dug a total of 9,174 bottles. During the early years, I predicted we would dig between 7500 and 10,000 bottles. As accurate as that guess was, I could have been a weatherman. To put things in perspective, we keep all the reasonably complete bottles we find; a few chips around the tops of bottles don't bother us. In 2018, we bought a mini excavator to expedite dirt removal, but we were still digging with our little shovels.

The Battle Creek Bottle Dump- A Brief History

Digging Deeper

At times, more in-depth exploration became necessary as deposits thinned. Our friends Doug and his son Dylan have a bigger backhoe and have helped us out in that regard many times. As we dug our way east, deposits were found to be older and deeper in the ground. In 2019, we dug 5,228 bottles, bringing our project total to 20,186. So much for my bottle digging forecast. By this time, we had also dug over 15,000 stoneware crock/jug shards along with many miscellaneous items. 2020 was a huge dig year for us; we set a personal best one-year total of 7,365 bottles.

The Battle Creek Bottle Dump- A Brief History

That Darn Leg

2020 also marked what is arguably our most interesting find, an amputated human leg. The leg find is an interesting but exhaustive story. We know who the original owner and operator of that leg was; the Office of the State Archaeologist in Iowa City disagrees with us on the identification, but they are wrong. Our bottle count grew to 27,561, and we also added almost a thousand displayable non-bottle finds to our collection that year. There were now 4,158 miscellaneous pieces on display in addition to the bottles. We continued to dig for the next five years. This dig is rather unique in that we are the only ones to excavate this dump site, and all of the items are being held together here as a single collection. We do not sell anything we dig except scrap iron.

Exhibits

We have modified our inventory system to include approximately 40 categories. While we focus more on the bottles, we have found thousands of interesting pieces other than bottles. Displays are important to us, and over the last few years, we have developed several of them, both inside and outdoors. An outdoor exhibit displays over 40,000 crock shards as well as glass insulators, decorative plate pieces, and more. We strive to clean and display at least one of every bottle type and style that we find. These bottles, as well as duplicates, are stored indoors, with over 6,000 different bottles cleaned up for display. In addition, we have prepared over 7,000 miscellaneous finds for indoor display, including stoneware jugs, crocks, stoneware fruit jars, and other household items.

Our collection from this ten-year digging project now includes over 41,000 bottles and more than 75,000 other finds catalogued in the 40 categories mentioned above.

We would be remiss in not mentioning the invaluable assistance in identifying some dug objects that we have received from Mark at Iowa Antique Bottleers-thank you!!

Questions, comments, or requests to view the collection can be emailed to