Not a Mother's Day story

The sellers of patent medicines in the 19th and very early 20th century did not seem to be overly troubled with ethical concerns.  They were out to make a profit.  But most of them had a little more sense of propriety than the guys running the Hurlbutt Chemical Company.  On admittedly circumstantial evidence I have come to the conclusion that they were selling venereal disease nostrums using their mother's name!  Ick.

The starting point for this patent medicine detective story is this rather drab little bottle:

Front and Back...

As you can see this is from Eau Claire.  In the circa 1900 time frame that this bottle comes from this was hardly a major patent medicine center, and none of the handful of known companies sound anything like Hurlbutt.  So you scan the short list of chemists, druggists and pharmacists to see who might have been putting up medicines under this name.

I came up with the Gadsby brothers.

Fred and Thomas Gadsby were local boys.  Fred graduated the University of Wisconsin School of Pharmacy in 1885, probably in the fashion of the day apprenticed a couple of years, then opened his own pharmacy in Eau Claire in 1889.  His brother Tom joined him a few years later and they did well enough to open a second store in Eau Claire and another in an outlying community.

Fred Gadsby certainly dabbled in patent medicines, he registered a trade mark in 1898 for a medicine called "Anti-Gon".  Even in the euphemistic Victorian era you could not mistake this for anything other than a gonorrhea medicine.  He seems to have done well enough in this side line to have erected a building specifically for the manufacture of patent medicines in 1904.

So where does the name Hurlbutt come into the story?  Well I mentioned that they were local boys.  Their father John was a tailor who moved to Eau Claire in 1871.  The occupation of their mother Helen is not recorded but I did find a reference to her maiden name.

Hurlbutt.

Ah, just coincidence maybe.  Surely pharmacists in the era of mutton chop sideburns and high collars were upstanding members of their community, right?

Consider a few other bits of historical detritus that came my way.

February 1906.  Martin Brandon, a former clerk attempted to shoot F.H. Gadsby. Although the assailant was said to be an "eccentric character" who had been drinking, there is also veiled reference to a personal grievance being involved.

An undated reference mentions that their branch in Cornell, Wisconsin had a brush with the law.  Specifically they were cited for selling "intoxicating liquors to a minor".

1919.  Thomas Gadsby goes on trial for selling a newspaper with obscene language. Specifically this was an issue of the "Twin City Reporter" that contained an article about a Chinese citizen of Eau Claire and his involvement with "white girls".  A fine of $200 was imposed but later overturned on appeal.

1920.  Fred Gadsby is charged with selling adulterated food.

1922.  Tom Gadsby is charged with selling moonshine from the Cornell pharmacy branch.

Fred Gadsby eventually decided to set out for climes more in tune with his moral fiber.  He moved to Los Angeles and made a pile of money as a real estate speculator.

So, could I imagine these characters borrowing their mother's maiden name for a slightly disreputable business sideline?

Why, yes.  Yes I could.

Farewell to Northumberland - May 2013

Leaving northern England now, so posting is going to be a bit uncertain.  Probably back to the usual Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule with the occasional add on when so inclined.

More travels, work, and the odd bit of old material that I need to get around to.

A good excavation trip, fun company.  And if I did not find any glittering treasures I can still claim a signal accomplishment.

The Twice Brewed Inn has a long running pub quiz that has been voted the worst in Great Britain.  Nonsensical questions tossed out in a Liverpudlian accent by a capricious dictator.  The worst part is that other teams get an opportunity to cut you score by half, or if you are particulary a target of their ire, by 75%.

As the Vindolanda team tends to be fairly proficient (an odd mix of academic credentials and implasuble pop music knowlege is usually in evidence), we almost always get knicked hard this way.

But this week we pulled it off.  Winning a substantial victory we claimed first prize, which turned out to be a beer stained LP of Peter and the Wolf.  It is generally advised that teams play for second place which is a bottle of wine, but we had the bit in our teeth and could not be stopped.

Victory was ours.

So farewell to Northumberland, and farewell Twice Brewed Inn.

Vindolanda 2013 - Tenth and Final Day

A two week session where no digging time was lost to weather....unprecedented.

My Dark Age/Late Roman floor ended up looking nice when cleaned up but not much for dating materials.  A good part of the day was spent in clean up but a few things turned up in my trench.  And more in the trenches of luckier diggers.

I did find this, it appears to be a Roman door handle.  Elsewhere on the site a key and the bronze facing for a lock turned up, making a nice assemblege.

Here is something I have been looking for ever since I started digging Roman - a brick with a legionary stamp.  Evidently specialist troops from the elite legions were detailed to help build forts such as Vindolanda which were in general constructed by and garrisoned with auxiliary troops from around the Empire.

This stamp is from the Sixth Legion.

Here is something very, very old.  A fossilized tree trunk built into the wall repairs.

And finally, any guesses?

It is apparently a pile of hobnails.  They were found in a fairly dense concentration and appear to be all that was left behind when a Roman boot or sandal vanished over the past 1800 years!

So tools down for another year.  I look at the floors and features we exposed - many due to be further excavated in years ahead  What lies beneath?  Only one way to tell.

Hoping Fortuna smiles upon me.

Vindolanda 2013 - Day Nine

We spent the day working through the late/post Roman debris to something that is trying to be a proper floor surface.

We think it looks rather nice.

As to dating it is still anybody's guess.  But I did find two coins today.  One was just a wisp of greenish dust, but the other has a small chance of helping to pin down the chronology.

Another find of the day.  This time the head guy stared at it long and hard before ruling that it was indeed a Small Find.  Behold the majesty of An Unidentified Metal Thing.

Oh, I thought I had a bit of excitement there for a bit.  Troweling along I came to this.

I had some possibilities.  It was a square stone, certainly it had been worked.  And it had what looked like a letter S on it.  Or was it a lighting bolt?  Or a rune?

It had a chance of being something very nice, like a small altar.  Alas, alas.  It turned out to just be a stone with a possible mason's mark on it.  Or maybe just a natural squiggle, I have seen odder things.

Off to the pile of stones being kept for conservation work.  Our mason should approve.

Vindolanda 2013 - Day Eight

Not that much to report today.  We finished the floor level of the last few days and backed up to take off another section of grass.  This process is called "de-turfing" and I rather enjoy it.

I suppose to be clear we are not actually finished with these floor levels, it is a five year archeological plan so the levels we are now at will be peeled back slowly over the next few years.  There are probably two or three hundred years of additional floors and so forth further down

The current layers are short on artifacts simply because of how late they are.  These shabby walls and tumbled down floors are very late Roman or more plausibly post Roman.

A fascinating era in history really,  I am pretty sure that people huddled inside these rude walls and talked about rumors they had heard about this fellow Arthur, or to give him a more Roman and plausible moniker, Artorius.

Odd bits do turn up.  I thought this was something...such and odd shape and a surprisingly pointy end.  The chief archeologist on site pondered long and hard and decided "Nah, just some sort of nail".

When the Dark Agers had lost coinage and pottery they still could work with iron.

They also seem to have been keen hunters.  A nice wild boar tusk turned up earlier this week.

And check out this bit of antler.  Man, that was one substantial deer.

Vindolanda 2013 - Day Seven

We like to think of the Romans as being incredibly organized and efficient.  And indeed, they did do many things quite competently.  But as civil engineers they had their shoddy moments.

The Vindolanda site where I excavate was occupied from circa 90 AD up until the Romans left or disintegrated circa 410.  (And beyond into the Dark Ages, but we know so little.)  In that time there were two stone forts and something like 8 wooden ones.  All on the same site.

Inevitably newer structures start sinking into older ditches and basements.  Nobody kept any records of previous work, perhaps.

So you see all sorts of bending and buckling walls.

In my corner of (?) barracks block the floor has simply dropped away to unknown depths.  You can imagine some distant ancestor of Tim the Tool Man Taylor just dumping more and more rocks into it in an attempt to level it up.

Central to this mess is what looks to be a damaged segment of round column that may have been given up as a flawed specimen, or perhaps broken when it was "borrowed" from another building.  Maybe they tried to run some kind of planked floor across it?

I had nothing for small finds today but interesting stuff is happening here and there.

This is a bit of "mortaria" a Roman grinding bowl.  Note the coarse, rough grit built into the glaze.

And here are two "in situ" pots.  The first seems to have been discarded after being fire damaged.  The normal black glaze has turned red.

The second was tantalizingly buried in the floor of a late barracks.  Could it be a bank for the soldiers stationed there?  Alas, carefully excavated by a first year digger (they always find the cool stuff), it was empty.  Account closed.

Vindolanda 2013 - Day Six

A nice day of digging on site, balmy winds instead of the usual Northumberland rain and mud.

The area I am working on is in the corner of some sort of building.  Based on how Roman forts of this sort were usually laid out it ought to be a barracks.  But it is larger than expected.  There are also large numbers of arrowheads turning up.

Specifically I am up in one corner of the place.  The floor is made up of big flat slabs that appear to be sinking dramatically.  This often means they are subsiding into something older, perhaps a ditch from one of the earlier forts.  But there really should not be such a thing here.  Mysteries.

Various things turning up on site.  Broken coins - the late silver ones would have been sliced and diced for charge.  A possible butt end of a spear.  A bit of chain.

And of course the inevitable bits of pot.  Here is a nice wine cup (?) base.

Here is a bunch of just washed items to show the mix of pottery, metal and whatnot.

A lot of excavating is pattern recognition.  Observe the two items below.  One is a broken fragment of brooch.  The other just a seriously warped nail.  Can you see the difference?*

Here is a slightly easier one.  One is a lead item unearthed a year ago.  It is a "good luck" charm in a familiar pattern.  The other is an elaborate bit of soft stone formed by water erosion into a close miminc.  We refer to this as a "mudstone willy".  I seem to find these every other year or so.

Sun and glorious digging weather predicted for tomorrow!

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*don't feel badly, I couldn't figure these out without a bit of assistance and I could actually see them.