Parlor City Pickers & Diggers

09/26/2025

Today we did a presentation on privy digging at the kilmer mansion in binghamton. All money raised goes into restoring the mansion and preserving it for the future. We had a good turnout and look forward to doing another.

08/29/2025

Shayne and Ryan dug a privy earlier in the back yard of a house built in 1838! Unfortunately this pit wasn't anywhere near that old. Most of the finds we yielded were c1890s-1910s era and a lot of it was broken. Better luck next time.. hopefully 🍾

07/27/2025

Some of the pontils from today's dig.

07/27/2025

We are in it.

05/19/2025

We went and did some metal detecting yesterday and Shayne got his 2nd ever silver half dollar! Ryan got a merc dime and some cool local coupon tokens

04/27/2025

Rochester show. Our table is set up.

04/24/2025

Come see us at the show. We will have a table set up with bottles for sale.

04/14/2025

Never digging a wet pit again......Got to dig our first pit in over a year yesterday. First door knocked and got permission. Found the pit within 2 mins. Based off sanborn maps we had an idea where it was. Couldn't tell if the pit was to the hotel on main street or to the house we knocked. It was a quite large wood liner 10ft long 5 ft across and 6 ft deep. We hit water at about the 4 ft mark. Tried to bucket it out but it just came back in making digging very difficult and slow. It started getting late so we gave up with about half the pit left. We filled it in and were about 2 ft short for fill dirt. Luckily we knew the neighbors across the street who let us use some dirt. After about 20 trips carrying full 5 gallon buckets we had it all filled in. We didnt get out of there until 11:45pm. It was our first time and last time digging a wet pit.

03/28/2025

Come see us this weekend at the Baltimore bottle show. Hope to see some of you there.

02/24/2025

Ryan and I (Shayne) did some picking the other day at a loaded 1850s farmhouse! Attic had been untouched since about the 1960s and all other parts of the home/out buildings were loaded!

01/14/2025

Big project not to far from us where archeologists are digging in some privys. Would be cool to know what they really found but with most projects like this the public never finds out much details. The artifacts are usually put into a box and hidden in the basement of some state building never to be seen again. A similar project took place in binghamton in the early 2000s where one of the earliest parts of the city was. We have tried asking to see what they found but they say it is strictly off limits to the public. The items are all held at the local university. They say the best they can do is offer a showing(for a fee)where they will pick out a small sampling of random artifacts and talk about them for an hour. We have even asked for just an itemized paper list and that was shot down. I can just imagine a drakes catawba bitters clanking around in a box with some Scott's emulsions and hoods sasperillas. Who knows what they found but we will likely never know.
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12/25/2024