Shoutout to that guy who showed me a clay pipe fragment in a creek bed last month

I was hiking near a dried up creek outside Austin last month when an old timer stopped me and pointed at a weird looking rock. He said it was a broken clay tobacco pipe stem from the 1800s, probably dumped by a settler. I thought he was joking till he pulled out a magnifying glass and showed me the tiny bore hole where the stem was hollow. Now I can't stop looking at every piece of broken pottery I see on trails. Has anyone else had a random stranger teach them something huge about spotting old stuff in the wild?

3 comments

3 Comments

wesleyburns20d ago

Wait, are you actually going to start carrying a magnifying glass around now? I mean, cool story and all, but it sounds like this guy was just some bored retiree who wanted to feel important for a minute. People find broken pottery and old glass all the time, most of it's just trash from some farmer's junk pile a hundred years ago. Unless you live in a place with actual history like Jamestown or something, you're probably just finding pieces of a broken flower pot from the 1950s. I get the excitement of finding something old, but let's not pretend every random rock by a creek is a colonial artifact. You're gonna drive yourself crazy looking at every piece of gravel thinking it's a musket ball.

robin_campbell3620d ago

Is this the hill you really want to die on today?

rileyjones15d ago

Half the fun is realizing most of it really is just old junk.