How are bottles found?

BrkatifNYs

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Mar 26, 2012
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Shreveport, Louisiana
Someone of a newbie here. Dumb question. How do you guys find your bottles? Obviously, not with a metal detector since the bottles are made of glass…unless they have lead them?

Do you guys just happened to stumble upon an old bottle cache as you’re metal detecting for other items?
 
Back before we had landfills, people would discard their trash on their own property. Sometimes in a outhouse or privy hole. I find trash pits just outside of the property, usually in areas the trash would be less visible from the road. River bankings were common spots to dump your trash as well. I have found bottles in many of these situations. Also, I have found bottles with metal attached, with my metal detector, so it does happen sometimes, just not very often.
 
Back in my home town we had permission with the city to explore digs where they were replacing underground pipes. You could take a flashlight around the dirt piles at night and just look for the reflection. Our city back in the tail end of the 1800s buried their trash to raise elevation near the water line of the harbor.

In the woods while detecting, I find them sticking out of the ground or I get lucky and there's a nail signal or something else I dig and end up finding them. Cellrdwellr provided good info on the family sized dumps. Best detector luck will be to find old trash with detector and maybe pick up a probe to poke around in the dirt to feel for them.
 
One of my favorite and early old bottle finds was when I was a teen, over 45 years ago. Christmas Eve at grandmas, I explored the crawlspace of her 1800’s-built Victorian style home and back in a corner found early amber Paine’s Celery Compound, aqua Kennedy’s Medical Discovery, and other cool old patent meds. I’ve been in old one-room schoolhouse crawlspaces, and those of barns, all great spots to check.

I found my first late 1800’s trash dump when I was 12. Most common are farm dumps trickling over a ravine or on the edge of a swamp, edge of the property, usually pretty obvious. I’ve also found old bottles in the attics of abandoned houses, in which I had permission to be on the property.
 
Privy holes can sometimes be seen. They tend to have an indentation in the natural ground. 4-8”. Kind of circular indentation. Sometimes there will be multiple indentations in a row spaced about 6ft apart where they moved the privy to a new location. A privy probe can help locate them but I’ve also seen a privy probe run through a bottle. The probes usually go easily into the ground in the privy area where the natural ground around they are hard to push into the ground.
 
If I see pieces of glass around a certain area I poke around a bit and see if there are more slightly buried underneath. People back in the day usually put their garbage "out back" and forgot about it. If you see big piles of misc rusty metal and some glass here and there investigate further.
 
In my early days, poking around old house sites with a potato rake wherever we saw sign of trash.

But the metal detector has put me on my best and most valuable glass. Just last week I was digging deep iron signals and believe it was the skeleton key that got me into a small colonial pit, where what could have been my oldest bottle find, late 16 to early 1700's.
 

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I started out as a bottle finder.
Back in 1981 I think it was when I graduated from 8th grade our class had a picnic/ recreation party at McNears beach in California. Well it happened to be a low tide that day and walking on the beach we saw tons of bottles exposed in the mud. My friend picked one up and it was an old coke bottle.
We took all the bottles over the years from there.

I found milk bottles dumped on sides of roads and creeks next to roads.
We found the original 1800s dump for our town and it just happened to be uncovered from the pavement in 1996! It was great digging!
 
ALL good advice above!

Most all dumps have some metal in them. cans, metal scraps etc so metal detectors will find bottles. I have found single lone bottles in shallow ground by just random probing when it looks like a good spot (shards on surface, depression in ground etc.). Sometimes I probe my arm off and find nothing too.

Peruse down this and some preceding pages in this forum as there has been much written in the past about finding bottles. You will learn a LOT about what to look for and where. And, yes, you need a probe to properly find bottles, even when no metal is around them. Here are a couple I made:
 

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A metal detector will not find a bottle with lead in it. But it will find bottles with metal tops and Hutchinson stoppers. I find them both a lot.



Both bottles were found with a detector. Stoppers intact inside
 
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