Industrial Archaeology - Brewery Style

OK, I admit it, I have interests that bring me into contact with some interesting people.  Doubtless they feel the same way about me.  Recently I had a chance to travel to the southern part of the state and help some of them out with an ongoing project.

It seems there is a historic brewery site that has fallen into disrepair.  Rather than let it suffer the fate common to such places - a quick but final tidy up with bulldozers and excavators - there are diligent efforts afoot to clean the place, study it, and eventually make it into an impressive public space that highlights the history.  Here it is today:

Various things were on tap for my brief stay.  A test excavation next to the old bottling plant...

There's at least ten feet of solid glass at this location, other spots might run deeper.  The number of bottles involved is staggering.

And why?  A small number of mis-returns from other breweries turned up, you'd never help out the competition so those made sense to discard right away.  A larger number of  bottles had just the tops chipped off, raising the possibility of them being units that were damaged by the bottling equipment.  But the sheer mass of these, many thousands of discards -most of them crushed - makes for the possibility that this was a mass purge at the time of Prohibition.  And this remarkable degree of destruction also gives the impression that they were destroyed methodically.  Was this usually done before shipping the "cullet" back to the glass house for credit on your next batch?

Naturally there are caves on the site.  Two well sealed ones are excavations from the 1860's.  The third is speculated to be the original 1850's cave.  It is known to have been "accessed" by visitors as recently as the 1990's.  So of course we felt obliged to explore it a bit.  Just to make sure it was not going to be the target of foolish kids trying to find creative ways to endanger themselves.  Here is the starting point:

Vines cleared away and a start at digging down.

Surprisingly the roof of the cave was quite a bit deeper than expected.  You can see it under the horizontal bit of stone near the bottom of the hole.  There is a good ten feet of fill on this spot.  And to boot, the folks who secured this site 25 years ago tossed in plenty of railroad ties and Lord knows what else deeper down.  Tip of the cap to an efficient public works crew.

While we were disappointed that we could not even sneak a Go Pro into the space and learn more about it, we feel we did conclusively prove that no casual vandals would be getting into this cave.  We then proceeded to add even more rock and timber.  I was tempted to write various messages on these beams as we placed them.  "No, you really don't want to dig deeper".  "Seriously dude, you are like maybe 5% of the way there.  Tired yet?"   "There's probably dead cats buried in here".  And so forth.

That phase of the project was so much fun I was ready to carry on with additional brush clearing duties.  But my cohorts claimed fatigue and insisted on a bit of time off.  Really, what's the younger generation coming to?  I mean, my car thermometer was still reading a two digit number!