It’s very gratifying seeing people have a piece of history for the house they are living in”

Brandon Lewanski

When looking at the lot on a bird’s eye view of Hastings in 1867, the house doesn’t look particularly noteworthy. The corner house was at the edge of the city at that time, but its distinctive roofline can be recognized to this day. Its large lot with a slight hill down from the house is unmarred by a garage or shed and would make it a good spot for a privy.
And that is exactly what Brandon Lewanski was counting on.
Using ground penetrating radar and a backhoe, Lewanski, along with other diggers, sifted through layers of dirt in the backyard of the Hastings home. They are a group of bottle diggers, amateur archeologists, and history buffs that dig privies and other sites looking for buried historical artifacts.
Lewanksi started with a backhoe, moving earth where he guessed the privy was before entering the hole himself with a shovel.
The first find, apart from tree roots and layers of old concrete is the bone of a turkey leg.
The detritus of food, from bones to seeds, is all that’s left of the human waste that the privy was meant to store. It means they are on the right track.
What Lewanski and the others are looking for, however, isn’t a glimpse into a family’s diet some hundred years ago, but the trash that was thrown into privies from bottles to pottery to whatever else families of a bygone age discarded.
“It’s a treasure hunt every time,” said Dylan Kirchoff, a fellow digger who sometimes works with Lewanski.
Privy digging is a cottage industry of history buffs, antiquarians, and amateur archaeologists spanning the country. They swap tips on how to identify when a bottle was made, trade finds with some collectors preferring certain types of bottles over others and sell their goods on Facebook Market pages and specialized websites.
Lewanski and the other diggers laugh about recent YouTube videos from diggers across the country, and fabled finds from construction sites and sewage workers. Lewanski ranks among them, sharing his finds on the Facebook page Pioneer Archeology and accompanying YouTube channel.
From the growing crater, the men file into the hole to poke, prod, and dig into the bottom of the privy. What emerges from the privy spans decades: Two 1920s ketchup bottles, shards of China and Red Wing pottery, a porcelain doll made in Germany, a blue bottle of Philip’s Milk of Magnesia, and an 1880s bottle labeled “McGee’s Female Tonic.”
Such varied finds along with a number of other glass shards, unmarked bottles, and dishware are indicative to Lewanski that this site wasn’t just a privy, but several that were built one over another across decades. For example, the 1920s manufactured ketchup bottles were found feet above the broken off bottom of a pre-Civil War era bottle with the telltale pontil scars indicating the bottle to be hand blown.
Two hours into the dig, a cry goes up as the first Hastings bottle is found, some 4.5 feet below the surface. Kirchoff poses with the bottle, dirt still clinging to the ‘Hastings Minnesota’ inscription as Lewanski takes pictures for his channels.
The bottle is labeled Frank W. Finch City Drugstore, which Lewanski estimates to be from around 1910.
The group works throughout the day as the crater expands across the lawn, new dirt being pushed into the old hole as the group digs nearby. They lay bottles out in a line that stretches feet alongside broken mug handles, ink wells, and dishes.
They show their finds to Mark Adams, the homeowner who allowed them to dig in his lawn in exchange for the finds which he intends on displaying within the home.
“Bring them back into the home from whence it came right?” quipped Adams.
That level of communication and cooperation is important to Lewanski, who prides himself on working with homeowners and even other diggers and historical societies.
“It’s very gratifying seeing people have a piece of history for the house they are living in,” he said.
It isn’t always the norm for privy diggers, however.
It doesn’t take much looking to find shaky handheld footage of digs in the middle of the night, the camera held almost to the ground to only capture the hole and stop others from knowing where the dig took place.
Such videos, according to Lewanski, are often indicative of diggers digging where they shouldn’t, either without permission from the property owner, or in otherwise protected places.
These shady actors, who might be motivated by the financial promises of selling good finds, can give a bad name to the hobby which even at its best is famously secretive with diggers protecting their finds and dig sites “worse than fishers or hunters,” said Lewanski.
This secretive nature belies the amount of historical research that can go into finding new dig sites.
Lewanski scours old insurance maps, newspapers, plat maps, history books and Google Earth overlays, to find new sites. That level of research “gets you in the ballpark,” of where one should dig, but can be augmented based on a number of other factors. It led Lewanski to remapping Nininger Township, because the previous plat was off by about 15 feet, which he spoke about to the Hastings Area Historical Society about last month.
While one might be mistaken for thinking Lewanski is a professional, with high-tech ground penetrating radar, heavy machinery and 30 years of experience under his belt, for him it is still a hobby.
“I don’t ever claim to be an archaeologist, but what I do is archaeology,” said Lewanski. “But I can’t speak for everybody.”
Oftentimes smaller construction sites don’t have archaeological consultations which can lead to the destruction of artifacts. In addition, Minnesota’s climate is especially damaging to glass, with hard freezes able to pop the necks off bottles as water gets in and expands when frozen.
These factors are among those that motivate diggers in recovering artifacts that would otherwise be lost.
“To me, it’s being destroyed faster than we can protect it […] it’s a race against time,” said Lewanski.
At the end of the dig, the hole is refilled and Adams and the diggers pack up the lines of bottles, plates and dishes.
The hobby, a historical deep dive in every sense of the word, has “got a little bit of everything,” said Kirchoff.