(cheerful gypsy jazz music) - My name is Frank Harchak.

I am a bottle collector and a privy digger.

Privy digging is digging out old outhouses.

(lively folk music) I am always a little bit nervous because when you mention digging out old outhouses, people look at me like, "is he a goofball?"

But when I was younger, I'd go walking to the woods hunting or taking a hike and seeing an old bottle laying in the woods.

And it was neat to bring it home and do the research on the history of the bottle because every bottle tells a story.

I find things from the mid 1800s and early 1900s.

I've found medicine bottles, horseshoes, crocks, soda bottles, ink bottles, household artifacts.

You name it, you can usually find it in a privy.

When I started digging privies, I got very interested into our local history 'cause the bottles that I found told the history of my town.

I would find shoe polish bottles.

That more or less told me that they went to church every Sunday.

I found little olive oil bottles.

That usually told me that Italian people lived there.

And medicine bottles, that told me what illnesses they had.

I find ink bottles and that usually tells me that they were probably immigrants that came here and they sent letters back to their homeland.

So I found a lot of money in the privies.

What would happen was they would go in and pull their bib overhauls down or the women would pick up their dress, the money would fall out of their pockets, and go through the cracks and 130 years later, we would find the money.

The tools you need for privy digging is a shovel and a probe, a little hand rake, a backpack, and definitely some insect repellent.

The probe is a metal rod about four feet long.

I put a pipe on the top of it and I make sure the pipe is hollow.

It's like a T-handle on the top and you push that into the ground where there's a void.

And where the ground is virgin, it would only go down a couple inches, but where there's a void in the ground, it'll sink all the way down.

And that way I can hear the glass through the vibration of the metal rod that comes out to hollow pipe which is my T-handle at the top and I can tell if I'm hitting brick, glass, or wood.

I look up old maps of the area and I just walk in the woods and I look for apple trees in the woods because that's a sign that somebody lived in the area.

Back in the 1800s, everybody around this area usually had an orchard.

That was their supply of food.

Tame lilac bush, that's usually a sign that there's an outhouse in the area because the old timers planted the lilac bush to keep the odor down around the outhouse.

And if you start looking around, you'll usually find an old foundation.

(knocks on door) I ask the property owners if I could dig in their yard and they get a blank look on their face, but then I explain to 'em about privy digging.

And when we start digging and start finding stuff from the 1800s, they went down in the hole too.

You can determine the age of the bottle by the seam on the side of the bottle.

The lower the seam on the bottle, the older the bottle.

If the seam goes all the way over top of the lip of the bottle, it was made with an automatic bottle machine, usually from 1918 to the present.

Below the lip and neck of the bottle, it's 1880s to 1890s.

And lower than that would be from your 1850s to 1860s.

And the Golds Act, it was a federal regulation that a bottle had to be marked in volume or measurements.

So if you do find a bottle that doesn't have ounces or measurements, you know it's before 1915.

The things that I like to find the most is the Hutchinson soda bottle.

It's my favorite bottle to find.

This is the metal wire that was the stopper.

And the stopper would go in here, it had two rubber discs around the stopper and it would be placed in the bottle like this, and when the people would hit the stopper, the carbonation would make a popping sound, which is the term we have today.

soda bottle and pop bottle.

The privy was a place to hide things.

We found guns.

We found things that were stolen.

There was a lot of mining strikes in this area and there was a lot of violence and shooting.

And the coal and iron police or the sheriff would come to the house and the best place to hide something was throw it in the outhouse 'cause they wasn't gonna look in there.

The most unique thing I found, I was digging a privy one day.

I found a piece of metal, it looked like a griffin, and I dug it out a little bit more and it had angels on it.

And then finally I got a hold of it and I pulled it up and it was a crucifix stolen from a church.

And I took it to the local priest and he collected crucifixes.

It was from the early 1880s and we both figured that it was stolen.

The thing that bothers me the most is when we find a ceramic doll baby from the 1800s.

It usually has a white face and the eyes is out of it and has about seven hairs on its head.

I don't like to bring them home.

It reminds me of something from "The Twilight Zone".

I just don't wanna see that floating around in my bedroom.

I've been doing this for over 20 years.

It's exciting.

It's a great hobby.

Privy digging is probably the last treasure hunt here in the United States.

(mellow folk music)