Eyes on the past

Susan Tissot, executive director of the Clark County Historical Museum, explains what century-old garbage can tell us about Vancouver’s development. (Photos by STEVEN LANE/The Columbian)

Artifacts found in the Vancouver area, shown, Friday, September 26, 2008, are stored in a Clark County Museum warehouse. (The Columbian/ Steven Lane)

Artifacts found in the Vancouver area, shown, Friday, September 26, 2008, are stored in a Clark County Museum warehouse. (The Columbian/ Steven Lane)

Artifacts found in the Vancouver area, shown, Friday, September 26, 2008, are stored in a Clark County Museum warehouse. (The Columbian/ Steven Lane)

Artifacts found in the Vancouver area, shown, Friday, September 26, 2008, are stored in a Clark County Museum warehouse. (The Columbian/ Steven Lane)

@NormalParagraphStyle: Remnants of bygone days Archaeologists say the household items found downtown were discarded from about 1870 to 1920. n Billiken, the SpongeBob of its era, also turned up in Vancouver’s trash. Back page

As archaeologists examined some of Vancouver’s 120-year-old garbage, they had a surprise: A lot of it wasn’t garbage.

They realized that those dirt-stained artifacts offered some lessons about people, about Vancouver and about American society more than a century ago.

A few of those lessons will be shared in local classrooms, thanks to a partnership between the Clark County Historical Museum and a regional archaeology firm.

The artifacts — more than 40,000 of them — were pulled from 1 blocks of downtown Vancouver a few years ago. Archaeologist Bill Roulette said the project left him and his crew overwhelmed, and then surprised and amazed.

“It was a wonderful site,” said Roulette, president of Applied Archaeological Research. “It was a surprise to see the variety and wealth” of material dumped into garbage pits and outhouse shafts.

It isn’t culturally sensitive material; no tribal artifacts, no human remains. But it reflects the day-to-day lives of the people who used to live here, and the decade-by-decade transitions of this community. And that’s the value it will bring to classrooms.

Some items will form the basis of a hands-on history curriculum. A discarded button can spark a discussion of fashions, said Susan Tissot, the museum’s executive director.

A piece of china can tell us about design trends in Europe, Tissot said.

Two teachers will be chosen to develop educational kits for students in grades four through 12.

The hands-on experience captures the reality of an item in a way you can’t get “from reading about it,” said State Archaeologist Rob Whitlam.

“These kits are so evocative,” said Whitlam, with the state’s Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation.

The material was collected in January 2004 during construction of the Vancouver Convention Center and Hilton Vancouver Washington. The artifacts had been discarded by people who lived in that portion of downtown Vancouver from about 1870 to about 1920.

It was garbage a century or so ago, but the material was part of a significant advance in research, said Whitlam. The Vancouver project was the department’s poster child for 2005. An “Urban Archaeology” poster, highlighting some of the Vancouver artifacts, was designed as part of the state’s annual “Archaeology Month” observance in October 2005.

It was a salute to “the depth and richness of a pioneering effort in understanding urban archaeology,” Whitlam said.

This region offers rich veins for researching native tribes and early settlers, including the Hudson’s Bay Company: “Fort Vancouver is a flagship institution in studying that period,” Whitlam said.

The 2005 project was a pioneering effort at understanding our recent history and the “development of urban environs on the West Coast,” Whitlam said. “There has not been a lot of urban archaeology done on that time period on the West Coast.”

The material recovered by Roulette and his crew filled 300 cardboard boxes.

“We were overwhelmed; we didn’t know what do with all this stuff,” Roulette said, but volume wasn’t the only thing that got their attention.

“To see the contents of every room in a Victorian home was a surprise,” said Roulette, principal investigator at the Portland research firm.

Even more surprisingly, he said, “A lot of stuff we found hadn’t been used up or broken; whole sets of ceramics.”

That said something about the people who lived in that place at that time.

“Victorians viewed themselves as modernists,” Roulette said. “It was about the latest things, and that’s consumerism. It boiled down to people wanting this stuff, then finding a way to get it; and when they got tired of it, they threw it away.”

Several innovations converged to nurture what Roulette called consumerism running rampant.

“It was the first time payment plans had been instituted, to buy on credit,” he said. Meanwhile, shoppers had a lot more choices.

“It was the heyday of catalogs, the beginning of department stores, and consumers were given opportunities to dip into purchasing they’d never had before,” Roulette said.

It marked a shift from the use-it-up, wear-it-out approach to household goods.

“Before, dishes got used,” Roulette said. “After they were guest dishes, they became everyday dishes. And after that, they might go out to the porch with a bar of soap, next to the pump.”

There are lessons to be learned from “real” garbage, too, said Tissot, executive director of the museum. That includes pieces of bone that had been discarded by cooks or wiped off greasy plates a dozen decades ago.

“Animal bones tell us about food processing,” Tissot said. “Were people hunting? Was there a butcher in town? It all indicates changes in eating habits.”

Bottles can provide another window to the past.

“With medicine bottles, we can look at what early Vancouverites did to take care of themselves,” Tissot said.

That might include sipping themselves into a stupor. One of the patent medicine bottles had contained a tonic brewed from red wine and cocaine.

Some residences transitioned from one-family homes to boarding houses. When several single men started to rent rooms in one house, Tissot said, they left behind some durable clues: “A lot of liquor bottles.”

All that, and more, was culled from an area measuring 380 feet by 200 feet. The archaeologists were summoned when the initial ground-breaking phase of the redevelopment project uncovered artifacts.

“A city ordinance protects cultural resources,” Roulette said. “When they started uncovering artifacts as the earth was removed, the city issued a stop order.”

Roulette said he and his crew worked 17 days in a row, from first light to last light, to finish the job and give the site back to construction workers.

It didn’t involve extensive digging. They went 20 feet down in one spot, but most of their digging was within four feet of the surface. Even the privy shafts that doubled as toilets and garbage disposals a century ago weren’t much deeper than that because of the soil near the Columbia River.

“You can’t dig holes in sand and gravel,” he said, so any shafts deeper than that had to be lined with brick.

Some civic history also can be traced by backtracking toilets and garbage, Roulette said. It illustrates Vancouver’s transition into a modern community. That happened a little slower here than just across the Columbia River, by the way.

“Portland grew as the metropolitan area and cultural center” in this region, Roulette said. “It had the advantage of being founded by people who’d come from a settled and staid part of the country, New England, and the seeds there were different from Vancouver’s.

“Vancouver grew as a town outside Fort Vancouver and became a trading crossroads and an agricultural community, and it stayed that way a long time.”

One measure of civic progress is the pace with which municipalities took over water, sewage and waste management, he said.

“It was pretty late in Vancouver, compared to most places. In 1917, they passed a new ordinance: If you’re within 100 feet of a sanitary sewer line, you had to close your privy and tap into the sewer line. That was the end of the privy.”

However, garbage was the individual household’s responsibility until 1944, when Vancouver started compulsory garbage collection.

Other civic functions, including street paving, played roles in the research.

“One house that stands out was Sarah Slocum’s,” Roulette said. “She was the wealthiest person on the block and stayed there a long time. She had really nice materials.

“It was covered about 1900,” he said. “That turned it into a time capsule for us.”

Tom Vogt: 360-735-4558 or tom.vogt@columbian.com.