JACKSONVILLE, Ore. – Beneath the old mining town of Jacksonville, newly discovered tunnels hold neither gold nor silver, but treasures of another kind – garbage from an earlier era.
Pharmacist Dennis Clark is sorting through what he describes as an SUV-size mound of stuff extracted from a mine shaft beneath a commercial-and-condo development he is developing near the center of town. The shaft later became a dump.
Historians seek out garbage dumps, which can yield valuable information about how earlier generations lived.
Clark is particularly excited about items that may have come from apothecaries.
“So far there are about 50 bottles, all in the 1890s and 1930s range. Some of the inkwells still have blue ink on the sides. And there are medicine bottles older than me,” said Clark, 42.
In two eras, people dug underneath Jacksonville. Once was during the gold rush in the 1800s. The next was in desperation during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when 50 shafts were dug.
It is not unusual to unearth clues to the town’s past during construction projects, said city planner Scott Clay.
In the case of Clark’s development, workers discovered a Depression-era shaft covered over with planks and decades of trash. They excavated last week, taking about six dump trucks of material as the hole filled with water from a nearby creek, Clark said.
“The corked bottles just floated to the top,” he said. “We got 50 or so in one scoop.”
“It was nothing spectacular. No gold. No silver,” said Steve Ballard, general contractor. “We just dug it out. It was trash and old wood.”
But Clark said one to two truckloads of the material looks to have mining debris or trash to sort through.
His project is expected to be completed in 2007.
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