After reading my Pond Boss which I SO look forward to I saw an article by Mike Otto of things he found with his dozer, which brought me to this subject...what 'unusal finds' have you found in or during your pond excavation?

I, for one, recall a couple of items-- part of a rusty metal trivet and about a 2'x 4' piece of concrete (which to this day I still say was a grave marker of sorts as it reminds me of those I saw in Louisiana growing up). But, of course I was the only one who thought so and I have kept it and will use it in a flower bed.

What finds did y'all uncover on your digs??

ya mean, stuff like this?

While digging footers for a room addition we found an old pipe sticking up with what looked like a water faucet attached. With torch in hand and half my body down in the hole I started cutting it off. Suddenly gas spewed out extinguished the torch as I jumped out and tackled my coworker to the ground thinking it was going to explode. It turned out it was attached to some sort of big tank. We still don't know for sure what it was.

I found nothing but I certainly enjoyed the article.

I found half-burnt garbage where the previous landowners apparently had their burn spot.

Gosh! That's pretty bad and made for some cleanup Theo.

Our house sits on 5 acres attached to the farm acreage and I know my husband had found pieces of pottery show up in the field; we think maybe there was a house here at one time long, long, long ago. Nothing intact or worth keeping. I thought maybe we'd find some unusuals when excavating but never did.

Over the years just as much stuff has been covered up as has been uncovered. The next generation of diggers will really have some fun, Lots of private trash dumps but also just about anything you can think of. People would have an old car or tractor they did not want to haul off so a big hole would be dug and in it would go.

I have several old silted in ponds. I cleaned two out, hit sand and realized that they probably never held water. Or maybe they didn't go as deep as I did. Around all of them, I find signs of habitation. Around heavily wooded land like mine, I think ponds/tanks/pools were mostly dug close to home for a good reason. I generally can find old cleared areas for probable home sites. So far, metal detectors have only produced rotten barb wire and other junk.

I have found an old hand dug, rock lined, water well. It is between 2 small draws and the depth varies with the season. The location between the draws is interesting. It is a perfect place to dig using manual labor since the holes in the creek would be the last thing to go dry. As the water seeped down, it hit a sand seam or aquifer. There is a cleared place next to it. However, the clearing is over the property line so I haven't tried to go there. I probably will someday. I cleaned out the old small pond next to it and it holds water OK. The wild hogs love to wallow in it.

I found a pre 1900 medicine bottle at the head of my pond. My property used to be a small cotton farm in the late 1800s. I was told that there is also an old 1960s Opel at the bottom of the pond put there to prevent seining

Found a couple of broken arrowheads (nothing great) but the dozer dug up a big granite rock, which now sits in our flower bed along with a beatiful pink quartz stone.

The granite stone weighs about 1500 pounds and the quartz, maybe 600. Weird thing is they were both just sitting there, down about 24 inches, no other stone or rock anywhere nearby. Completely imbedded in a layer of clay more than 15 feet thick...

A geologist might be able to explain it, but it would be tough. How does an igneous rock become buried that deep (but not at the bottom) of a huge layer of sedimentatious material...

Glaciation...Ice Age...Climate Change....
OOPS..delete this...

I've always thought it would be cool to find some Native American artifacts or even pre-historic stuff. But alas, the only thing I've found is an old piece of clay drain pipe and parts of an old car. I'm told that in my area one can find things like arrow heads and knives in the swamp where I dug my pond. The theory is that Indians used to drive animals such as bison into the swamp where they got stuck and then they killed and butchered them. Here's a good one for any geologists out there. I saw a picture in a book once of a guy who found a steel hammer with wooden handle imbedded in coal. There was even part of the wooden handle left. How does that happen?

Interesting. I forgot about the big rocks, we found half dozen of really huge rocks and I used them at the outflow at the bottom of the dam in a flower bed with canna lilies. We thought maybe we'd get our farm name chiseled in one but haven't yet. It amazes me up north how these rocks with the thawing and freezing can make their way to the surface. Every year when I work my flower beds I find new large rocks with the shovel.

For 15 years before we put our first pond in, there was this little chunk of rock about 8" across that stuck up and struck the bushhog blades every time I mowed that field. I kept meaning to take a shovel and spud bar out and dig it up, but never got around to it.

When we excavated, it turned out to be an elongated egg shaped piece of pink granite 9' long and about 4' in diameter. I had my excavator stand it upright on the bottom of the pond, where the top is about 3' below the full pool line.

Guess my big ol' rock is just a egg....THAT'S a big rock...spud bar and shovel. You would've been cussing after a couple hours, eh?

Theo, I know that you know how those rocks got there...
Tell them the interesting story....

You mean how big chunks of Canadian Shield granite were hollowed out by Leprechauns and used to smuggle Labatt's and Molson's into the U.S. via ice age glaciation?

The glaciers kept the beer cold, too.

You got it, and you won't get moderated for telling folks where all that ice went....

The bar in the Sheraton Arlington?

Or did you mean what already melted?

Hand dug wells. I have seen as many as any body in the country.
Love to see them and think about who dug them, How they where built, How long they took, How they decided where to put the well in the first place.

As far as i know the hole had to be dug all the way to the water level then start back up with the walls. This must have been a task like no other.

I would have loved to get in on at least one.
The hand dug wells are allover the place at least in Texas and Oklahoma.

Otto

I'm new to the board, but couldn't resist adding to this post.

I have been working on a 1.5 acre pond for several years (I'm the DIY type). While working with the dragline, I've pulled up a couple of horseshoes. That's not too odd in this area, but the ones I found are made of aluminum!

Mark

Welcome to Pond Boss, lcommar.

I found this fish.

Welcome, Mark!

Glad you're here!

Mark

Welcome to the forum. Digging is a lot of fun especially when you get a look into the past.

Otto

I have not been digging in my current pond, but my family had some pond work done when I was a kid. 3 small tanks were dug out for livestock and one old pond was drained and deepened. We used the same guy to put up some pipe fencing and checking one day we found a bunch of pottery shards and broken arrowheads in practically every hole. We ended up calling in the sherrif when the guy would not give us what he had dug up, and when he checked the guys house it was full of artifacts from everyones' place he had worked at. The sherrif made the guy give all of it to the local college, a couple thousand arrowheads(whole and broken), trash cans full of pottery shards, some more modern stuff. Our property was on the highest hill around and the archeoligists etimated the hill had been used as a campsite for over 1000 years.

Nice story, j-3.

Lots of great stories.

All I ever seem to find are parts that fell off my tractor or implements.

Last summer I did find a 1940s-1950s coke bottle in what is now my garden. And, according to neighbors, we had what was reportedly Patsy Cline's outhouse in our backyard when we bought this place. My wife said the outhouse, with pink toilet seats and a tin roof, was an eyesore. I burned it down.

I worked a job last November running the service crane with a company drilling caissons piling holes to build a building on, these holes were 60 inches in diameter and as deep as 50 feet in some cases. I was amazed at the bottles the drill would bring up, we found bottle after bottle, unbroken too, the drill would auger in and then pick the entire load up and out of the hole, auger would reverse to empty itself, and you could pick the bottles right off the top of the pile. This was on the bayfront of Lake Erie and some of that stuff was down a good 20 feet, I understand it was all filled in some 50 years ago, we were drilling it up again, strange stuff.

I too am making my first post. Glad to have found this site! My grandfather in the Lansing area of Michigan found a caribou antler in one of his ponds when enlargening it. An old farmer, he also stumbled across mastedon bones on one of his farms. He donated those to Michigan State University. The lucky bugger also found oil on his property!

Greetings and welcome, NTCPA.

FWIW, I'm not sure we have any typical CPAs here. Ours all appear to be superior folk in one or more aspects.

Some great finds. Arrowheads/shark teeth...prehistoric. You would think with as big as a hole we dug, we would have found some great finds (it wasn't because I wasn't looking). Great stories.

Oil is the best I ever heard of.

Jimmy Hoffa?

All kidding aside. My grandfather dug up a tire with a solid stell rim still in it. The tire was solid rubber. We couldn't pry it up (We were digging a water hole by hand). Hooked a tractor to it and finally got it out. Along with the axle, the other tire and the drive shaft all attached but nothing else. Weird.

fossilized Miocene Megalolepomis spawning beds

Moonshine Still

Oil the best;;Moonshine still second best