The folks next door are expanding their parking garage. They’ve done extensive digging to put in a couple of parking levels below street level and came across some interesting things. The Foreman gave me a little bottle thinking we might have bought our printing ink this way long ago. Turns out this bottle contained ink for fountain pens. It was probably used in the office of the metal plating company that had been on this site since before WWII. It was produced by Sanford’s Ink Co. which started in 1857 in Massachusetts and moved to Chicago in time to be destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire. Sanford’s is still in business today, producing such products as Sharpie and Paper Mate.

Today we purchase our printing inks in 2lb Tins, 5lb Cans or in 30lb Buckets.

They also found a railroad train wheel which must have weighed 1,000 lbs and most of a Ford Model T. We know this because the foreman has twelve of them.

They didn’t find any whale bones or arrowheads so the full-time paleontologist and the American Indian Artifact representative didn’t have much to do. But the contaminated soil guy sure did. They were loading up at least five trucks a day for a couple of weeks and transporting the contaminated soil to Nevada. We are glad that we now have a parking garage as a neighbor instead of a chrome plating company.