Glass Middens

There are odd things you find again and again in the woods, and one of them you stumble across every once in a while is an area replete with lot of broken glass -- old bottles and jars mostly, with the occasional small piece of scrap metal or iron. Who the hell is dumping all this broken glass in the woods?

It took me some time to recognize what I was looking at: a midden. A midden is a term an archaeologist would use to describe an ancient trash pile. About a quarter mile up the road there is an ancient shell midden left by pre-Columbian Indians who gathered mussels from the Potomac River just down the hill. Today no one gathers mussels from the river -- groceries come in cans and bottles, and these are what fill our modern middens.

The glass middens in our woods are not very old, of course. Most of them represent that period between 1900 and 1950, when the country was fairly affluent, lots of goods were being bought in packages and bottles, and settlement was getting denser but rural trash collection services did not yet exist in many areas. Back then folks would toss their trash into a heap at the the edge of their property, burning it every once in a while in order to reduce mass and speed decomposition. This was a period before plastic, and anything made of paper or wood rotted, and a surprising amount of metal also atomized down to rust. Glass bottles might break, but otherwise they are as enduring as stone -- virtually untouched by rain, snow, mold or rot. If the broken glass is not plowed under or buried, it will stand proud on the ground or protrude a bit after being partially sunk in thanks to the heaving action of worms.

The trash you find in the woods is often some indication of how old the trash is -- the secondary growth around you represents the time passed since the trash was initially dumped on the edge of a field or hedge.

About 25 years ago, I came across a glass-filled midden in Ohio that consisted of many hundreds of shattered Ball canning jars, and in between were bits of broken glass tubing. I walked around collecting unbroken Ball jars and old zinc canning lids, but the glass tubing flummoxed me. What was that? And then I realized what the spot had been: an old moonshiners still. The tubing had been part of the coil, and the jars were the retail end of the operation. The big heavy pieces of glass represented the remains of the 5 gallon storage bottles. The zinc canning lids put this operation sometime before World War II -- probably in the middle of Prohibition.