Up Close and Personal with Ace of Spades

I spent almost three quarters of an hour with the Ace of Spades last week, and his new digging buddy Trails (right), taking pictures and talking shop. It was agreed we would all meet again at the 2012 Toronto Bottle Show, coming up on Sunday April 22nd at Oriole Community Centre Arena, 2975 Don Mills Rd, and that's supposing we didn't run into each other sooner on an exciting spring dig.

Dumpdiggers has always admired Ace for his prolific posts on the discussion forum which evidence a natural passion and insatiable curiosity and tireless digging routine. This guy is out there actively uncovering new stuff and gaining a strong following of collectors and historians feeding him tips and good information about his discoveries.  And he's growing a big collection!

Trails is an architect or in the building trades and as such has access to some old properties that being dredged up for renovation and redevelopment north and west of the GTA.  Ace is schooling Trails on what to look for when scouting properties for dumps, and how to dig bottles from the bottom up.  The science of sinking the shaft and then forking the sides.

KC the White Boxer Keeps an Eye Open

Myself and my white boxer dog KC arrived on the scene just as the boys where sinking a new hole.  Three or four feet down they starting finding semi-precious patent medicines and took that to be a good sign. The bottles were obviously cast offs (something cast off by earlier diggers) but that could mean there is fresh dump below.

The mall patent medicine was actually a Toronto sewing machine oil bottle.

The good stuff is six to ten feet below the smelly earth and the stoneware jugs and crocks which I have seen come up out of the dump are often right down in the morass and sunk below the water line (which rises and falls with the seasons - the same patch of land is dry in August and September. But in April, May and June you can only get down about nine feet before your hole will flood with really smelly black oily earth. That's the reality of this place. - Ace

Bottle Diggers, a photo by Roberrific on Flickr.

Ace found a number of small collectibles while I was visiting, including this small cobalt blue Bromo Seltzer bottle that is covered in embossing. This is another great sign because that is a bottle that most diggers would have taken home -  because its blue and has writing, so it has some value - and therefore one can assume that maybe perhaps this patch of dump was missed by the marauders who dug this dump so many years before...

This is my dog KC cruising the grounds around an old dump in the middle of Toronto that is currently being picked over by Ace , who is surprising everyone and actually finding good stuff in the tiny scraps of century old dump that can still be glimpsed in the goody veins below.  KC was real impressed.