Gilroyan archeologist Mark Huddleston digs up the local past
where old outhouses once stood
By Jennifer Penkethman Special to the Dispatch
Gilroy – Don’t be alarmed if a man with a shovel appears at your doorstep, telling you he wants to dig up the treasure in your backyard.
It might be Mark Huddleston, Gilroy’s resident “outhouse archaeologist.” For more than 30 years, Huddleston has been digging up sites where outhouses once stood, excavating bits of Gilroy’s past in the form of bottles, doll parts, marbles and even dentures.
“The outhouse was the all-purpose disposal site,” explained Huddleston. “It was basically a dump.”
What we would nowadays throw in a recycling bin, Gilroy’s ancestors might have thrown out near an outhouse, also known as the “privy” (for “privacy”). People deposited a variety of objects, some valuable and others not so much: pharmaceutical bottles, tins for toothpaste, doll heads and arms, children’s marbles, glass darning eggs, and also weirder finds such as dentures and even syringes, made of an early form of today’s plastic.
For Huddleston, the hobby stretches back to his childhood.
“My friend had a paper route, and I went with him one time,” Huddleston remembered. “We saw a couple of guys digging up a site at one of the houses on his route.” The two men called themselves “officials,” and swatted the children away, but Huddleston’s interest was aroused. He investigated the art of outhouse digging, and discovered it wasn’t so difficult for anyone to do. According to Huddleston, “All you have to do is dig a hole!”
For years, alone and with partners, Huddleston has been Gilroy’s most active “privy digger.” A Google search for “privy digging” turns up 244,000 results, from informal groups of friends excavating sites around the neighborhood, to national groups who advise on their Web sites how to make the best profit from artifacts found.
But Huddleston is clearly in it for the history, not the money. Ask Huddleston about any of his artifacts, and he can rattle off numerous historic facts about the period in which it was produced. Often the specifics of the bottle give him clues to its use. Blue bottles, for example, signify that the bottle was used for something medicinal; Gilroy once had five pharmacies, and their custom-embossed bottles come in all shapes, sizes and colors. Other bottles have turned purple with age because of a process of infusing them with citrate of magnesium, in order to bleach the glass of its natural aqua color. Huddleston appreciates the flaws of such bottles over anything else, saving the glass for its imperfections. He regularly finds whiskey flasks and prescription bottles.
There are many insights to be gleaned from these finds, he said. For example, one can learn the methodology of the early pharmacists, and what kinds of medicines were easily acquired then, but are illegal today.
“Most of the stuff they prescribed were opiates,” said Huddleston. “They’d give you a bottle full of opium which made you think you were better, but really you’d just be getting addicted to whatever they were prescribing.”
He described how, at one dig site, he found large prescription bottles near the top of the soil, and as he dug deeper, the bottles became smaller. Working backwards, Huddleston guessed that whoever lived there “started out being prescribed small doses of the medicine, and then as he got addicted, he got larger and larger quantities.”
But Huddleston doesn’t dig alone. Rick Pisano, of San Jose, met Huddleston when he answered an ad for help wanted with digging expeditions.
“It said, ‘old bottles wanted,’ ” recalled Pisano. That was 30 years ago. He and Huddleston still go on digs together, and have dug up a museum’s worth of items in the suburban neighborhoods of Gilroy.
Huddleston and Pisano begin their hunt with a very specific kind of treasure map: fire insurance maps of Gilroy from around 1900. Huddleston explained that outhouses had to be marked on these maps, so that the horses of fire fighters wouldn’t accidentally get stuck in the soft soil found around the outhouse. The little squares, like footnotes to the larger house-size boxes, are exactly what the diggers are looking for.
They consult the current residents, who sometimes are living in structures as old as the town itself. In other cases, the plot of land has been torn down and rebuilt three or four times. The outhouse is often long since gone, but the soil below remains soft, which Huddleston can detect with a digging probe. As soon as the resident gives consent, the team can start digging.
“A lot of people are receptive to it,” Huddleston said. “Unfortunately, a lot of times we find sites we call ABD – already been dug.”
After the dig, the owner of the house owns half the objects found therein, and the rest is split between Pisano and Huddleston. In the cases where developers are building on the site, the construction crew receives their fair share of the loot.
The artifacts recall an age in which snake oil salesmen frequented budding towns like Gilroy. Pisano and Huddleston have found bottles that once held cures for rheumatism, “inhaler medicine” (which Pisano guessed contained cocaine, from the nose-shaped spout), ammonia for gas lights, hair restoration cures, trout oil and a mysterious substance called “magic oil.” There is even a bottle for “oil of gladness” – unfortunately, it has long since been emptied. Then there are more ordinary finds: ink bottles, soda water bottles, oyster ketchup and pickle bottles, and of course the everpresent whiskey bottle, shaped like today’s metal flasks.
“A lot of these guys were alcoholics, and wanted to hide it, so they’d get rid of the evidence where the family couldn’t see them,” Huddleston said.
Pisano specializes in items found in the Bay Area, most of which were produced at glass manufacturers in San Francisco. There were also glassworks in Berkeley and Oakland. In Gilroy, these bottles can be found in high frequency in areas that were once saloons – anywhere near downtown – and around the yards of wealthy areas. Huddleston has even found Native American artifacts, which he said were deposited in the area after farmers manicured fields for agriculture, and themselves dug up a variety of objects, only to be left later in the soil.
Tom Howard of the Gilroy Museum said that they have received a plentiful bounty of historical items from Huddleston over the past 20 years.
“He’s seen it all, and he’s very generous with what he finds,” said Howard, who has had the chance to accompany Huddleston on one of his digs. Huddleston’s finds are on public display in the museum.
“These bottles are all important, as they provide a visual history of Gilroy’s heritage and development, as well as the unique quality of the glass blower’s art,” reads the plaque which Huddleston has written for the museum.
Among the items Huddleston is still searching for are bottles from Gilroy’s local brewery, founded in the 1880s. So far, they have found only broken parts of them. Pisano said the oldest objects they have found date back to the 1700s, and the latest, from the 1890s. “Around the turn of the century, people stopped having outhouses,” Pisano explained.
“Water and plumbing systems came to Gilroy around 1900,” said Huddleston. “But some people held out until 1920.”
These areas, Huddleston said, are still too new to excavate.
“We’ll leave that for the next generation.”
