What’s the difference between trash and treasure? That’s a question Daryln Brewer Hoffstot grapples with in a recent essay published in the New York Times titled “What Things Left Behind Say About a Home’s Past, and the Times We Live In.” The writer lives on a farm in rural Westmoreland County, and she’s found a lot of stuff there — some old, some more modern. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple recently talked with her about it.
LISTEN to the conversation
Kara Holsopple: What prompted you to write the essay that was recently published in the New York Times?
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot: I have collected, for whatever strange genetic reason, my mother would have done the same thing, stuff I find. It’s all junk, out in the fields and forests. And I’ve saved it for 38 years. The barn is just filled with all this stuff, and I finally started to think about it. What can I learn from all of these artifacts? As I say in the piece, I call them “artifacts,” which is a fancy name, and most of it is really somebody else’s garbage.
I wanted to clean up the land, and I wanted to learn something about who was here before me. We live in an old log house. We’ve assumed it was 1860, but we didn’t know for sure. I’ve tried to date it. I’ve been to the courts in Greensburg. I’ve been to the tax office. I’ve talked to a log cabin expert. And so I thought maybe I could learn something from looking at all the artifacts.
Kara Holsopple: Tell me about some of the older artifacts that you found on the property.
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot: I found this very cool ceramic pipe from about 1895. I found a little tiny piece of clear glass that I didn’t even think anything of. And then one of the archaeologists told me it was actually from an old drug store. I didn’t know this, but back in the day, they used to put their name on the glass so they didn’t have to have a label, because if the label came off, then you couldn’t identify where it came from. An old piece of a Clorox bottle from the 1930s.
I also learned that brown meant that the contents were poisonous. I found old gardening trowels and pieces of farm machinery everywhere. Last year, I found a piece of slag that I thought might be a meteorite. I was really excited. I was like a fourth grader. I came home and started researching it, and got to a website that said, yeah, a lot of people think that slag is a piece of a meteor, but it wasn’t.
Kara Holsopple: It’s just a leftover from coal mining in the region.
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot: Yes, exactly. But where? Clearly, there was coal mining here, but not right on this property as far as we know.
Kara Holsopple: So you have had archaeologists come to your home and look over some of this. How did you get connected with them?
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot: I did a lot of research and reached out to a couple of people online. Then I asked John Wenzel, who used to be the head of Powder Mill Nature Reserve, which is as the crow flies, about a mile from here. He gave me Tom and Pat Baker, who’ve done a lot of work on Fort Ligonier and work all over the country.
They came on a hot summer night out of the goodness of their heart. I didn’t pay them anything. I told them I wanted to do this project and figure out what all these things were, and they just came for a few hours. We went to the barn, and I had it all spread out. They’re the ones who gave me all this information. But the pottery was the most interesting to me, because, to segue back, they ended up dating this house according to the pottery that we didn’t have.
We had lots of what’s called redware. It’s a very functional, utilitarian pottery. But we didn’t have the things that would have come before, like pearlware. We didn’t have anything that would’ve come before 1850. We didn’t have anything that would’ve come before 1850… It turned out they (could date) the house according to the pottery that we did not have.
Kara Holsopple: What other kinds of conclusions did they make about what you found?
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot: They also found wire nails, and she told me that wire nails were not invented until the late 1850s, so that sort of backed up the pottery.
Kara Holsopple: Tell me about some of the more modern items that you’ve found around your home.
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot: This was the juxtaposition of this article. It starts really talking about all of the old things that I found in my hikes, but it ends by talking about the more modern things, some of which, as I say in the piece, we left out there: terracotta, pieces from pottery, plant tags, and rubber bands that end up in the compost heap.
But then there’s a corner of our property that’s very hilly and very remote. There’s just a big ravine there. I didn’t even notice all the garbage until I started riding my bike there. I suddenly started noticing somebody was throwing red, plastic Sheetz bags, filled with beer cans. There must be 50 of them, one of which is hanging from a maple sapling that looks like a giant red Christmas ornament. Somebody dumped the entire contents, the innards. of a couch.
One day during COVID, I went out and collected about a hundred items on that same road. It just upsets me no end that people can’t dispose of their garbage properly. It’s so bad for the environment. It’s bad for the water, it’s bad for the air, it’s bad for the soil.
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Kara Holsopple: As you write in your piece, there are some reasons people leave trash. There’s no municipal trash collection where you live. From your perspective, what are some of the solutions?
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot: I think Westmoreland might consider having a landfill or whatever, closer, or to figure out some other way to help people. It costs money to pick up garbage. People don’t have money for food, so they’re not going to pay to have people pick up garbage.
I think we need to think about a bottle deposit. I read this really interesting book when I was doing research on litter called Gone Tomorrow, The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers. She told me facts that really shocked me. In 1953, Vermont tried to restrict disposable containers because farmers said bottles were being thrown into hay fields and the cows were consuming the trash in their fodder. So they went to bat for that.
And then, lo and behold, what happens, a nonprofit called Keep America Beautiful enters the stage and they, along with American Can, Owens-Illinois Glass Company, Coca-Cola, and Dixie Cup, made us the villain. They made the villain the litter bug; they coined the term litterbug. That was taking the onus off of them. So they didn’t have to make refillable bottles or returnable bottles. And that has stayed in our society since then.
We have come a little bit farther. So Vermont now does have a refundable bottle deposit. Other states do too. Would that be an incentive for people not to throw their trash? If they could take all those beer bottles that are hanging from my trees and littering the ravine and the glass and everything and get money for them, I think that might be a really good incentive.
Kara Holsopple: The last questions of your essay are about what we are leaving behind for future archaeologists, like those plastic bags. What will those artifacts tell them about us? So what is your answer to that, or what’s your feeling about that?
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot: I don’t know, you know, it’s an interesting question, because could I draw the conclusion that all of these things that I find more charming, because they’re pottery and glass–was that a better way to live? Because they didn’t have garbage pickup either.
As Tom Baker, the archaeologist, said, they would put (their trash) in their manure spreader and just spread it around, or they would have designated dumps, and they would dump it. And of course, from my point of view, there’s a certain romance in the pottery and the glass. There’s no romance in the modern stuff that I’ve found. We should have more modern services now that help us not to have to go out and dig holes in our own land or throw it onto somebody else’s. So for me, if it were a hundred years from now and I was looking through all of this stuff, I don’t think it would give me a particularly positive feeling.
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Daryln Brewer Hoffstot is the author of A Farm Life: Observations from Fields and Forests.
