Found a 1920s milk bottle in my backyard, then dug up a plastic one from last week right next to it

I was digging a hole for a fence post near Tacoma and pulled out this old embossed dairy bottle from like 1923 (pretty cool, right?), but then six inches down I found a 2021 plastic milk jug lid. Has anyone else seen this kind of chaotic layering in their own yard?

3 comments

3 Comments

ryanh561mo ago

Not really buying the idea that this is some kind of mystery. Ground shifts over time, people dig up old stuff, and construction crews or kids probably churned that dirt around for a century. You live in a pretty populated area, that soil gets moved and filled all the time. Just sounds like someone's trash got buried near someone else's older trash lol.

joelwells29d ago

@ryanh56 you make a fair point about the soil getting churned up, but there's one angle nobody's really talked about yet. What if the spot where you found the stuff was actually an old property boundary? Places like that often had fences or hedges where people would toss things they didn't want to carry far. Trash pits along fence lines are way more common than most people realize. Back in the day, folks would just dig a hole near the property line and dump everything from broken tools to old bottles. So it might not be random trash from different eras, it could be one spot where someone dumped stuff over a couple of generations in the same hole. Just something to think about.

simon_coleman29d ago

@ryanh56 That theory about property boundaries makes sense, but I had a buddy who found the same thing near Puyallup. He was leveling ground for a garden shed and pulled out a 1940s soda bottle right next to a crushed Mountain Dew can from, like, 2018. Turns out his property was an old farmstead where they just kept using the same trash pit for decades. Soil gets mixed up more than people realize.