A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the odder things I’ve discovered while working on the site of the Old Library. Needless to say, I have not stopped finding such things. In addition to the usual glass and plastic bottles and aluminum cans, candy and gum wrappers, plastic cups and flowerpots, I’ve found a two-foot length of pipe embedded in concrete (apparently at one time some sort of boundary marker or fencepost), two baseballs without covers (the covers, each in two separate pieces, were found nearby), a small wire rack of indeterminate purpose, and other odd bits of metal (and that’s not even counting the large pieces of hogwire fencing, overgrown with vines, standing up in one copse).
Two of the more intriguing finds, however, are shown below. Working in the area south of the library building, I kept finding fragments of some white material that I took to be ceramic tile of some sort. I kept collecting the pieces and eventually brought them home, thinking it might be interesting to try to reassemble them, like an archaeologist reconstructing a broken pot. The jigsaw below shows what I managed to construct after I’d washed the pieces and laid them out. On closer inspection, they proved to be part of a piece of asbestos siding, grooved to look like woodgrain. It is still a bit of a mystery where they came from, however, as the exterior of the library is stucco.
The second item is even more mysterious, as it’s not even clear what it’s made of. It has a sort of grain and is presumably wooden or at least vegetative (a section of thick vine, for example), but it must surely have been intentionally shaped. The entire thing is about 5¼″ long, and the first 4″ or so are shiny, as if coated with some kind of lacquer. The pointed part is rough, as if it might have been sanded into shape. It is not perfectly cylindrical or straight, again arguing for a natural origin, and the bottom, though apparently cut with a saw, is also not straight or smooth. I can’t imagine where the object might have come from or what it is meant to be.
WalkThoughts 