Maps

Have you ever wanted to see a map that has both the Episcopal Church and the Spencer Optical Works on it? Well, now you have. Spencer is in the upper left corner, and the church is toward the bottom of the map, slightly right of center. "P. E. CH." stands for Protestant Episcopal Church.

Given our finds in the "privy"/dump, I decided to take a second look at some of these old atlases to get an idea as to who might have contributed to the material we found. The map above shows the church in 1881. There's a small building to the left of the church, on the property of George Van Kleek. Did the domestic material we found come from this house?

The map below comes from 1879 and is extremely confusing to me. It's oriented the opposite way as the 1881 map, but that's not the confusing part. You can see the same small building on the property of George Van Kleek. But what are all those buildings associated with the Episcopal Church?



Here's a close-up ----->

Did all of those buildings disappear between 1879 and 1881? Was one of them, perhaps, a stable for horses? (I know that we have some record of outbuildings associated with the church, but I can't remember what they were and when they stood off the top of my head.)

In any case it seems that in 1879 and 1881, the only building close enough to contribute to the dump was that small building on George Van Kleek's property. Perhaps this building is the source of the Great Universal Stomach Bitters bottle, which dates from 1870-1880. And perhaps the people living in this building were drinking Rudolph Boehmer's sodas and beers, manufactured from 1871 to 1900.

The teapot could date to earlier than these items, or it could be contemporary. Laurie suggested that it was a Brown Betty, which seems likely, but given the fact that Brown Bettys have been manufactured continuously since 1695, we need something else to narrow down the date! We do know that earlier Brown Bettys were less round than later ones. Given the size of the spout, our teapot may have been very tall and relatively angular in shape.