As I may have mentioned in another thread asking for help, I live in an old house. How old, I’m not sure of as the listing said 1900. However, I heard from someone in the neighborhood that the listings will say 1900 for any house built prior to that. From other sources, I know that my neighborhood was built from 1890 to 1910 on my street and into the 20s and 30s as you go north.
Recently we remedied the lack of insulation in the house by having some insulation blown into the attic space. A previous owner who was an idiot had decided to seal over the access into the attic and thereby removing the roof access as well, therefore we had to make a hole in the ceiling. The spot we chose was the useless closet in the octogonal bedroom. After the insulation guy cut through the ancient plaster and lathe and had climbed up, he called me over, and handed me a document which looked like a passport. It was rather mildewy but I opened it and it turned out to be a doctor’s address book and calender from 1894.
I climbed through with a flashlight and poked around a little. Near where the passport was found I found a group of pictures from a photographer and a folded over piece of paper. The pictures were of Danville NY and seem to be from the same time frame. The paper which was in pieces I didn’t look at right away thinking it was a letter. Today, I looked at it. It looks like it was someones commission as a Corporal in 1862. Pretty neat.
I still have a 1935 silver certificate one dollar bill, some aluminum (?) pennies, and some very worn out mercury dimes and buffalo nickles- stuff like that.
One coin lost was a very thin gold coin that said “1849 California gold piece” or something. I don’t think it was a real coin- perhaps a souvenir of some kind. Lost, in any case.
I also found some old hand-made doll clothes that were made for and belonged to my grandmother (her dolls, that is). G’ma left notes with the clothes- they are from 1870 and 1890. One dress was made especially for a doll so the doll could take part in a holiday play for school. My grandmother lived in Oklahoma Territory at the time!
My grandmother used to buy old houses, fix them up and rent them out. We found all kinds of stuff when I was a kid. Once, they found $300 behind a cabinet, and finding old newspapers, bottles and odd junk stuffed into the walls was somewhat common. (Our guess was that the builders chucked their trash in there.)
My favorite discovery was when we removed about twenty layers of wallpaper and found, drawn on the plaster walls, charicatures of three women. It was labled “My Sisters” and each was wearing a giant bustle and huged puffed sleeves (dating it at about 1895, in my estimation.) That wall was slated to be painted, but I insisted we re-cover it with wallpaper so that someone else could have the joy of finding it someday.
Another time, I found a small wooden box hidden under the floorboards. It contained clay marbles, a lead soldier and a few intersting rocks and bits of string. I still wonder to this day if it was the “treasure box” of some little boy who had lived in the house, and why he never retrieved it from its hiding place.
At my parents house there’s a large rug on the floor of the attic.
Also there was a poster from `59 stuck in the wall between my bedroom’s closet and my parents bathroom shower wall. It was a pocket door closet so I assume that the poster was taped to the closet door and became stuck in the wall. One day some shower repairs were needed and my dad chipped out a few tiles and the sheet rock behind it. He pulled out the poster. It was a poster with drawings of space-crafts. I thought it was fascinating.
We once found some old cheques, dated in the 1920’s, in a house we rented. Also, when they were fixing up my church, they found newspapers that had been shoved in the walls for insulation when the place was built - 1912!
Not too long after we moved into our house, our bed (the one my wife has had since childhood, and it was already an antique back then) apparently had not liked being disassembled and reassembled, and one of the rails cracked, the other becoming highly damaged in the collapse of the bed (we were lying on it at the time). The rails were built with an inner rail to support the slats, and had sets of thick, metal hooks embedded in either end to interlock with slots on the frame. We despaired of being able to get them replaced or fixed.
So less than a week later, we are cleaning out our garage, finding all sorts of wondrous things in the rafters (fluorescent tubes, curtain stretchers, etc.), when what should appear directly over our heads, but a pair of the exact same rails. No sign of the rest of the frame, just the rails. We got them down, and they were a perfect match, after remedying the fact they were painted pink.
Not in the attic, but in the first house I bought back in 1980, in the basement, I found a knife in a metal sheath. The end of the handle is formed like an eagle’s head, and I think it’s also marked as having been made in Germany. I assumed it was part of a soldier’s kit, maybe a war souvenir a previous owner had brought home. I need to find it and take it to someone who can tell me if it’s special or just a common knife.
I know it’s in our basement somewhere - I’ve been carrying it from house to house for the last 25 years…
My parents remodeled a 100-year old house that we later bought and lived in.
During the remodelling, my father found a 50 pound bag of sugar in the attic. It was still sealed and looked fine. He called the company that made it - they were still in business - and asked them if it was usable. They said as long as it was sealed and clean, it was. He gave it to my aunt who was a cake decorator at the time and she used it.
The same house had Finnish-language newspapers in the walls for insulation. They stuck out in a couple places in the basement. I always liked looking at them.
Ooooh, what a great find. I love stuff like this. I collect ephemera, mostly old photographs and letters. My collection started when I grew up in an old farmhouse that my grandfather’s parents built. We found all sorts of old ephemera from the late 1800s to the mid-40s- old Christmas and Valentine’s Day cards, shopping lists and letters. In one letter, my grandfather’s cousin mentions going swimming in Bing Crosby’s swimming pool in CA during leave from WWII. Apparently, Bing Crosby had opened his pool to GIs.
I found the shopping lists and the oldest letters to be the most interesting. It’s fascinating to me to read the details of daily life from over a century ago.
It’s amazing what’s in the walls of old houses. I can never figure out what stuff was put there intentionally, what stuff just kind of fell in, and what stuff was dragged in by mice. I’ve found tons of junk over the years – keys, nails, screws, hairpins, lids, game pieces, grocery lists, letters, old shoes… It’s hard to keep from tearing the house down just to see what you’ll find.
When the previous owner of our house (built in 1920) finished the attic, he said he found an empty cigarette package of Russian cigarettes shoved behind a joist, so we figure the crew that built our house (Craftsman bungalow) had at least one Russian guy…
My favorite Antique Road Show moment was of a lady who found a spanish morion (like the kind the Conquistadores wore, with the fin across the top) shoved behind a beam in the house she bought. She thought it was pretty, with all the detailed metal work and gold leaf, so she cleaned it of with Windex and shined it up with Lemon Pledge, and put it on a little pedestal on her mantelpiece.
Turns out it was authentic, some officer’s parade helmet from back in the day, and worth more than her house.
Husband2U does home remodeling - and has worked in a TON of old houses. The owners usually tell him to keep what he’s found. This is a GOOD thing. Usually.
This was one of his recent finds in a basement rafter. Not this specific one of course, but one that was identical - except for OUR wagons weren’t started on - we have the original box, all the parts, everything. And an arrowhead which was sitting on top of the box.
Throughout the years we’ve ended up with old toys from the 1900’s, furniture, mirrors - you name it, we’ve probably got it somewhere in our house, attic or garage.
