Cool site. We come across recent and older dumping spots. Heck, back when I first moved here, townsfolk just chucked stuff off the roadside east of town and the owner of the bottom land welcomed large junk and fill to level the place out. It was kind of a mess to deal with later on, but it was eventually filled over and graded.
In the mining days here, it was common practice to toss tin cans and household junk into one or another of the test pits. We find bits of glass and pottery, busted household things, tin cans, rotted lamp batteries, but sometimes a little gem manages to survive the years relatively intact. Bottle and relic-hunting was popular here in the 70's and most of the productive sites were cleaned out long before ARPA. There's still unexplored junk piles along many roads and byways. There's at least one spot on our own property where we've found some old trinkets for the collection.
You do never know about old furniture. There was an old "Lightning Artist" speed painter who ran a tourist spot here for many years in the 1950's to the 70's. He was good at the kind of woodsy scenic art you see painted on old saw blades and such. He had a nervous habit of flipping half-dollars around in his hands. When he retired, he sold off the contents of his shop including an old couch and chair he and his buddies would lounge around in while he waited for customers. I bought both for two dollars, being a young bachelor, it was perfect for my near-empty "pad."
They were the old-style of build, made long before foam padding and they were filled with some sort of fiber that shed a lot of fuzz beneath them, so I got in the habit of flipping the chair over to vacuum beneath it. One time, to my great surprise, a 50's Franklin half-dollar was laying on the floor. The jarring of tipping it over had knocked it free. I sold it for 8 bucks and was thus already 6 dollars ahead on my auction buy! After that, we paid more attention to what else might fall out, and when we finally got rid of them a few years later, we made sure to tear them apart and that's when we found a second Franklin half in the couch. Ya just never know!
-Ed
