A g
For Tom Leveille, one man’s trash re-ally is another man’s treasure. Leveille and his group of volunteers have dubbed themselves “Virginia Bottles” and they dig up 18th- and 19th-century privies (outhouses) and wells to find old bottles and other items that might have been discarded there.
Leveille’s fascination with archaeology began when he was a student at Old Dominion University. In 2011, he began visiting towns and cities around Virginia and speaking with owners of historic homes to see if they would want to work with him to uncover some of the history on their property that may have long been hidden.
“Large metropolitan areas in the 19th century had lots of wells and privies that are important archeological features that for their purposes, when they were abandoned for indoor plumbing, they were just throwing trash away," explained Leveille, "but 100, 200 years later, the stuff they threw away is important to us now."
Virginia Bottles is based out of Richmond, but Alexandria is one of Leveille’s favorite cities to work in because of its history, which has been well preserved as well as the prevalence of outhouses. Every house built before 1920 had an outdoor privy built with it, which wasn’t the case for some other Virginia cities.
Oftentimes, these archaeological features are discovered when there is a sinkhole or depression in a homeowner’s backyard. Leveille will knock on doors and ask if he can dig out a homeowner's privy or well, for free, with the guarantee of filling it back up after he is finished. He and his helpers collect some of the bottles and items they find, but always offer them to the property owners first.
Sometimes, property owners want to keep everything that is found, and Leveille has agreed because to him, saving the history is the priority. Digs typically take one to two days and the number of bottles, ceramics and other items found varies. Leveille says he often finds glass bottles printed with the names of local bottlers and businesses during his Alexandria digs.
“It’s not like anywhere else that we do work as far as how much local interaction there is,” he said. One of the most prevalent bottles is that of the Alexandria-based Robert Portner Brewing Company. The brew-ing company was one of the largest in the country in the post-Civil War period thanks in part to Portner’s patent on refrigerated train cars meaning he could deliver cold beer. Unfortunately, the company did not survive Prohibition. Leveille has dug up more than 500 wells and privies in the past decade, from North Carolina to Philadelphia, including digs at more than 50 homes in Alexandria.
His favorite dig in Alexandria was at a house dating from 1835 at 918-920 Queen St. It took him nearly 10 years to get permission to dig, but once they finally did, they discovered a privy that was 6 feet wide and 20 feet deep filled with items dating from the 1830s to the 1920s, including the most intact pre-Civil War soda bottles than in all previous privies dug up combined.
Leveille admits he is not an archaeologist, and the digging is more of a weekend hobby than a job and definitely does not pay the bills, let alone the gas money he spends traveling from city to city. He works two full time jobs as a surveyor and runs an antique business with his girlfriend.
Leveille collects pre-Civil War bottles and his friends who assist him have their own collection interests. He does sell some of the items he finds at bottle shows and has won awards for some of the bottles he has found. Bottles aren’t the only items that Leveille finds. He has uncovered items like a Civil War-era boot, porcelain doll heads, ceramic chamber pots, old medical syringes and lots of buttons and marbles.
For Leveille, Virginia Bottles is all about the thrill of finding something new about history.“When we do these digs, we will uncover a new druggist that no one has ever heard of before or a variation of a soda that isn’t in any books or none of the museums have ever seen it before. The puzzle of Alexandria is so large that almost every single time you do an excavation, you find something that was previously unknown,” he explained. You can see some of these finds on the Virginia Bottles’ Instagram page @virginiabottles.
Not everyone is as thrilled with Leveille’s hobby. The Office of Historic Alexandria, specifically the office of Alexandria Archaeology, encourages Alexandria residents to contact them if they find a well or privy in their backyard. “We are happy to work with them to help preserve Alexandria’s important history,” said Eleanor Breen. “The buried history of Alexandria is like a book full of stories that have yet to be read…every time a well or privy is dug just to find and keep the bottles, we lose an important page in Alexandria’s history book,” reads a webpage on backyard archaeology on the City’s website (alexandriava.gov/archaeology/backyard-archaeology).
Ivy Whitlatch, the chair of the Alexandria Archaeological Commission, penned a letter two years ago to the editor of The Zebra newspaper, in response to an article published about Leveille. “Finding old bottles certainly can be exciting, but if excavated properly, we can discover who owned them, what food they ate, and other details of their lives. Without context, objects, even the smallest fragments, are robbed of a great deal of their power to tell a story and help us learn more about our past,” she wrote. City archaeologists do not necessarily dig up wells and privies unless they are under threat by development, believing it is important to preserve them underground for future generations of archaeologists to explore.
“We believe history should be shared,” said Breen.
