What You Might Find Putting Away Dahlia Tubers

[digitS']

William Taft, US President 1909 to 1913

To be honest, I found it in '96 when we moved in. I keep it down in the room with the dahlia roots, gladiola corms, spuds . . .

I'm afraid if I move it, I'll lose it . I asked a local antique guy about it and he said that these campaign pins are commonly counterfeited but the fact that it isn't in the most pristine shape and missing its ribbon suggests that it is the real thing. Taft ran for president 8 years after this house was built.

Steve

 

[canesisters]

So off you go to Antiques Roadshow!!!!

 

[Jared77]

Very cool!

 

[digitS']

The afternoon, I pressed my eyeball against the basement wall to look behind the shelf this campaign pin has been on all this time. Yep, there is open space back there - & something in there!

I went out and got the 4-prong cultivator and pulled out . . . a can. Label says "shellac thinner." Okay, nice to get that outta there - next! 4 chair legs . . . . Chair legs! Not very special ones either . . . oh, and there was a short board with a couple of nails in it .

See, these are the findings that Linn Bee won't come up with since she was there when the house was built and remains to this day! Kate will miss this also since she has seen every nail in her new home.

Steve
I've laid around and played around this old town too long
Summer's almost gone, yes, winter's coming on
I've laid around and played around this old town too long
And I feel like I've gotta travel on
And I feel like I've gotta travel on

 

[Chickie'sMomaInNH]

i'm in about the same boat.....house situation as you Digits. my house is listed as being built in 1902. dh says he thought he saw a cornerstone that states 1890 sumthin'. as we were pulling apart the old clay bricks in the decayed front steps i kept hoping to find some really neat items......an old broken beer bottle....from sometime in the late 1960/1970's :/ whoever built those steps did a really poor job, but i guess they had some beer to help fill in the space they didn't bother to buy enough bricks to fill in the center. (they filled it in with sand and built the steps around the pile)

while we were removing old cabinets from the kitchen i found some old Bakelite flatware. in the basement i found some of the old blue glass canning jars with the glass lids. there was the old Kellogg crank phone that i probably should have kept since it was probably original to the house when they first put them in, before the advent of rotary phones, before the advent of digital cordless phones, before the advent of cell phones that eventually got smaller and smaller and smaller......oh...next they will just have a chip in our head to directly connect to everyone wireless.

i've been finding all sort of neat stuff in this house. but the fun stuff usually gets dug up around the yard while tilling or just plain ole diggin! just hope i don't find the horse body that goes with the rusty shoe i found

 

[Smart Red]

Don't count me out yet, digitS! True, my house is pretty much what I put into it. (I suspect our old Yankee screw-driver is buried somewhere in the walls.) I still find a thing or two when I prowl around the 30 acres. However, our current project is redoing our son's new house. . . circa 1832. Together we already redid the kitchen with new wiring, plumbing, insulation, flooring and cupboards that fit the age and style of the Victorian/Scandinavian? structure. Now we are tearing the den walls and ceiling out to the studs/rafters to redo.

Anyone know how this guy 'insulated' his outside walls in 1832? Something else we've never seen. There is wood lathe and plaster throughout the house, but on the outside walls there is another layer of wood lathe and plaster. . . outside wall, air space, wood lathe and rough plaster, air space, then wood lathe and plaster finish. Not in the least fun to remove it, but it probably did work better than nothing in the walls at all.

DS had a visit from a grandchild of someone who used to live in the house and we have found that his beautiful wood trim is made from tupelo trees. Never heard of that wood being used for trim around here. It grows quite a bit to the south of Wisconsin so the Judge who built the house would have had to have it shipped in from down south. We're being VERY careful removing the wood work since I doubt we could get it replaced.

So far, we've found old pennies and old newspapers, but there's a lot of exploration on all three floors to be done before we finish. Could it be that they milled the trim wood right on site? There was an old saw set-up in the basement with a huge saw blade. Unfortunately, the orchard, gardens, and carriage house that belonged to the original owner had been divided off and sold as a building site well before we got the place.