Hamlin's Wizard Oil
Check this cool bottle out. The detail is amazing, the slightly cloudy glass still holding mysteries within. The raised letters provide a combination of sensory intrigue as well as an air of mystery.
Whatever can it mean and where did I find it? Well let me tell you a simple story, one I have put together by speculating on this and other fascinating items I recently had the opportunity to examine…..
…It was a hot summer day with the bright sunlight beating down on the fields, trees, and dusty streets of the small town. The muggy air, cloying and unrelenting, made cooling off even more difficult.
Inside the dwelling, the lady of the farmhouse fanned herself, hoping to catch even the slightest breeze to cut the steamy heat of the day. Her husband, a hardworking farmer, was out tending their fields and she was alone in the house with her two children, whose exuberance perhaps seemed an outcropping of their own struggles with the heat of the day. They ran around, darted up and down the stairs, shrieking and giggling.
Suddenly, a loud smash echoed from the kitchen.
The shouting and giggling stopped.
One small voice called, “Mama! We broke a plate!”
Sighing, the lady rose from the cane chair upon which she had sat for what felt like the briefest of breaks from her seemingly never-ending chores.
She approached the younger of her two children, now pointing at the pieces of a child’s plate on the wide plank floor. The red and white intricately painted detail now lay in disarray. The child began to cry.
“I am sorry, Mama! It was an accident!” Tears flowing down cherub-like cheeks, the little boy rushed, clutching his mother’s cotton apron, burying his tiny face and wailing.
The lady crouched down, took his face in both hands, and smiled, “don’t worry, sweetie. Accidents happen. Help me pick these pieces up.” Together they worked and they swept the pieces into a small pile. Gingerly retrieving them, the older child, a solemn, green-eyed girl of about eight years of age, added, “I’ll go put them outside, Mama.”
Rising from her crouched position, the lady patted the girl gently, “thank you, honey.” She gathered her son in her arms, kissed his tear-stained cheeks, and brought him to his room for a nap. When her daughter returned from the backyard, she sent her upstairs as well. It was too hot for fun and games. Time to rest and calm her nerves.
She reached into her pantry and brought out the new medicine bottle her husband had brought home last week. Maybe this would help, she thought. The man who rolled into town had said it would cure all nervous problems. It might work; her husband’s fig juice had helped with his problem recently.
That night, feeling much calmer, she prepared for bed, taking time to clean her face and straighten her perfume bottle which had tipped over. Can’t let that spill! That was all the way from France! She tucked her children in, kissed her work-weary husband, and settled in for the night. She had canning to do tomorrow, and had to make sure to find that breast pump for her sister….
….it was a cold morning, and the sun could barely warm the backs of the small gathered crowd, all peering into the newly-dug hole near the squirrel-planted maple tree in the far northwest corner of the yard.
The lady of the house, pausing for a moment from her work, wandered over to take a look. An untidy pile of broken, dirty crockery and glassware met her eye, sitting jumbled on a tarp just adjacent to the hole. A man’s head could just barely be seen as he tossed out random bits and pieces of what seemed like archeological relics onto the tarp and grass.
As the day wore on, eventually the dig produced an amazing collection of remnants. Now soaking in soapy water, sunlight touching their surfaces for the first time in over a hundred years, they hinted at stories long untold.
The lady of the house set to scrubbing and washing the many bottles, plates, a crock, and even a breast pump, removing decades of what the diggers had referred to as “night dirt,” in an effort to restore a sparkle once again.
Finally she set them into her own primitive cabinet for display once again.
They had come home.
Who was it in that hole and why on earth would anyone voluntarily want to dig in century’s old poo?
Two words. Privy Digging.
And what, you may ask is a privy?
Privy Time Machine
A privy is simply an outhouse used long before the advent of indoor plumbing. One hundred years ago if you had to go, it was a trip outside, and hopefully the weather was cooperative!
And it was not just the obvious that got deposited there.
Long before the days of curbside trash pickup, before recycling, before super glue, things that had become broken, obsolete, or simply emptied also found their way down the privy hole.
As one privy got filled, another hole was dug, the structure above was deposited atop, and so on. It is typical for most old houses built prior to the late 1800s to have as many as four privy pits on their property, veritable time capsules, holding secrets deep within the earth.
And so a hobby is born.
I can dig it
There are folks all around the world, amateur archeologists in their own right, history buffs, and trivia masters who spend their idle time going down these old holes in search of treasure.
What a Crock!
My particular privy digger, a robust man called Tom Majewski, is a local Chicago western suburbs practitioner of this messy activity. He’s an unassuming man who, after thirty-plus years of excavating local history, still exudes excitement at hitting that first crunch of glass as an ancient privy is discovered. He’s the go-to man for anything you may want to know about your house, town, or artifact that may make its way back from the depths. He’s so good at this hobby that he’s even had a children’s book written about him and his treasures, Dig It! Privy Artifacts A-Z by Sharon Weber and Marcia Mackenbrock. If you’re lucky, you’ll come away from this experience with some cool household stuff, a story or two, and even an autographed copy of this book.
Privy diggers do this for fun and their only payment is the option to have first dibs on the most interesting article they find at a dig. Some they keep, some they sell online or at auctions.
His most curious find? An intact egg.
They’re preserving history one privy at a time.
And they help return antiques to the very homes that once housed them well over a hundred years ago.
For my particular dig, what had they uncovered?
A broken bottle of Hamlin’s Wizard Oil.
Hamlin's Wizard Oil
According to Wikipedia,
It was an American patent medicine sold as a cure-all under the slogan “There is no Sore it will Not Heal, No Pain it will not Subdue.” First produced in 1861 in Chicago[1] by former magician John Austen Hamlin and his brother Lysander B. Hamlin, it was primarily sold and used as a liniment for rheumatic pain and sore muscles, but was advertised as a treatment for pneumonia, cancer, diphtheria, earache, toothache, headache and hydrophobia.[1][2] It was made of 50%-70% alcohol containing camphor, ammonia, chloroform, sassafras, cloves, and turpentine, and could be taken internally as well as topically.[2]
Traveling performance troupes advertised the product in medicine shows across the Midwest… with runs as long as six weeks in a town. They used horse-drawn wagons and dressed in silk top hats, frock coats, pinstriped trousers, and patent leather shoes—with spats.[5] They distributed song books at the shows and in druggists.[6][7] Performers included James Whitcomb Riley, singer and composer Paul Dresser from Indiana,[8] and southern gospel music progenitor Charles Davis Tillman.
Grinnell College research points out that the Hamlin’s claimed efficacy for Wizard Oil on not only human beings but also horses and cattle, one poster displaying an elephant drinking the stuff by lifting the bottle with the trunk. Bottles came in 35¢ and 75¢ sizes.[9] Carl Sandburg inserted two versions of lyrics titled “Wizard Oil” together with a tune into his American Songbag (1927).[10] In 1916, Lysander’s son Lawrence B. Hamlin of Elgin, by then manager of the firm, was fined under the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act for advertising that Hamlin’s Wizard Oil could “check the growth and permanently kill cancer.”[1]
A Consolidated Fruit Jar lid.
Child's plates and other artifacts
According to antiquebottles.net,
In 1859, Mason sold five of his early patents, including the Mason jar, to Lewis R. Boyd and Boyd’s company – The Sheet Metal Screw Company. Boyd is most famous for patenting a white “milk-glass” insert for zinc screw lids to theoretically lessen the chances that food would come in contact with metal. In 1871, for a brief period of time, Mason became a partner with Boyd in the Consolidated Fruit Jar Company. Consolidated hired other glass makers to blow their jars, including the Clyde Glass Works, Clyde, New York, the Whitney Glass Works of Glassboro, New Jersey, and the A. & D. H. Chambers Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Even after Mason’s patents expired, the manufacture of these jars continued for well over half a century.
Mason jars, still in use today, have a long and rich history. There were many types. Early ones were square which broke too easily. The angles were softened. Glass liners followed, and eventually the Mason patent expired in the mid 1870’s. Then they started to be mass produced. Lids and gaskets were very easy to come by.
According to antiquebottles.net,
Two companies would come to dominate the canning jar market in the 1860-1890 time periods; the first to do so was the Consolidated Fruit Jar Company, located in New York City, also known simply as CFJ.
Antique Mason jars still remain collectible. Depending on the vintage, you could spend very little all the way up many hundreds of dollars for these old household jars.
Lubin perfume bottle.
Sweet French Perfume
According to nstperfume.com,
Lubin was established in Paris in 1798. According to Edwin Morris, the perfume house, “…which began under Napoléon and became linked with the name of his sister Princess Borghese, was the first to solicit the North American market, aiming particularly at the plantation culture of the southern United States” (Scents of Time, p. 87) Morris reports that Lubin was still a “major perfume house” in 1940s Paris. They continued to release new fragrances into the early 1980s before slowly disappearing from the scene. You can read more about the history of Lubin here. The house was purchased by Gilles Thévenin from Wella in the early 2000s.
Website: Lubin
Modjeska Cold Cream
This ain't Ponds!
According to worthpoint.com, this was from the Larkin Soap Co., established in 1875 from Buffalo, NY. It was billed as a “A Perfect Emollient, soothes heals and beautifies the skin, cures chapped hands, lips and all skin irritations”
If you’ve got an old house, there may be treasures just waiting for you to unearth. If you don’t mind a bit of excavating and some scrubbing, you may want to find yourself a privy digger.
THERE ARE STORIES IN THE DIRT
Some great resources:
Will I ever sell these items on eBay?
One word.
Never.
Unlike anonymous antiques; lovely, intricate, strange, unusual, or primitive found at any one of a half-dozen antique stores in my Fair City, these recently unearthed items now adorning my home
WERE HERE A HUNDRED YEARS BEFORE ME
As for that child’s plate?
For A Good Child
It’s come full-circle.
Dawn is a budgeting queen!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
This is a fascinating article, Dawn.
Most of us have never heard of a Privy Dig. Even the antique people.
Congratulations.
(Is there a book here?)