Ash pit

“ The excavated pits must be well drained, and filling the bottom of the pit with rubble is a good plan. The further the tree can be planted from the kerb the better, so as not only to give it a larger body of soil, but to lessen the risk of killing the tree by the pollution of the ground with gas from a defective main, and also excess of moisture from the channel gutters. The distance apart of the trees is a matter of choice. ”

“ After the fourth or fifth day's rolling, they are put in a pit, and covered with wood ashes on which a little water is poured, and, on being taken out the next day, are gone over, and all balls which are soft or broken are then rejected, the good ones being put on the upper storey of the stone shed to get quite hard and dry. ”

“ The fact that modern tree roots invariably sought the richer soil of the pits' contents makes it quite probable that there are numerous other pits on the site that are still hidden beneath standing trees or cut stumps.
Dating: There is little doubt that Pit A was filled during the first decade of the 18th century.
PIT B
This pit (T.N. 30) was approximately circular, with a diameter of 9 ft. 4 in. and a maximum depth of 2 ft. 8 in. It was covered by part of the kitchen's north wall and by the whole of the east side of the kitchen chimney. ”

“ The pits, varying from two to three feet in diameter, and from twelve to fifty deep (eighty feet is the extreme) , are often so near the roads that loss of life has been the result. 'Shoring up' being little known, the miners are not unfrequently buried alive. The stuff is drawn up by ropes in clay pots, or calabashes, and thus a workman at the bottom widens the pit to a pyriform shape; tunnelling, however, is unknown. The excavated earth is carried down to be washed. Besides sinking these holes, they pan in the beds of rivers, and in places collect quartz, which is roughly pounded. ”

“ It is therefore excavated in horizontal corridors, with various branches, extending for many miles, undermining the whole surface of the soil, but not in large or deep pits, so that the name of sand-pit is rather deceitful to American people, who commonly imagine it to be always a large and deep pit to which these roads lead only; this is not always the case, the roads themselves being excavated in the layer of sand, and frequently themselves the sand-pits. ”

“ The mouth of the pit is then covered with wooden boards and plastered over with mud with great care to prevent a child falling into it; as it is held that nothing which has once gone into the pit may be taken out, even if it were a human being. It is said that once in the old days a man who happened to fall into the pit was buried alive, its mouth being covered over with planks of wood ”

“ The pit is about twelve feet deep and ten feet in width, and its outside edge is lined with a hedge five or six feet in height. As the fierce brute steals upon his intended prey, he nears the hedge and at one spring its highest branch is cleared. He reaches the earth only to find himself at the bottom of a deep pit, from which there is no hope of escape, and where he speedily becomes the merciless victim of a shower of deadly arrows and bullets. ”

“ The green can be reached easily enough with one honest blow, but there is a huge tree immediately to the right of the green, and a still more huge and infinitely more alarming pit immediately under the tee. The pit is very deep and its sides precipitous, and it is altogether a very formidable affair. Our opponents drove off, I remember, and perpetrated an ordinary ‘fluff’ or foozle, which left the ball on grass, it is true, but at the very bottom of the pit. ”

“ Fragments of pottery (rarely a whole vessel) also abound in each pit, quantities of implements made of bones and antlers, some forms of which are unlike anything known elsewhere, implements of chipped and polished stone, pipes carved in various shapes from stone, and objects of copper. In some pits several bushels of charred corn, which had been covered with bark matting, lay underneath the ashes; and in three instances human skeletons, or parts of skeletons, have been found in the pits,—a fact which seems to have no special significance. ”

“ They have a very ingenious method of taking game by pitfalls. They dig four or five pits eight feet deep, ten long and four wide, fifty or sixty and sometimes 100 feet from each other, not in a straight line, but so placed that when they make a fence from one to the other it would form the letter V; at the point would be the pit, and no hedge, so that an animal wanting to pass through would walk down to the opening, and as the pit would be beautifully covered over with small sticks and grass, made a very inviting road to walk over. ”

“ Halfway across the mesa there was what was known as "The Pit "; a circular hole in the plain; rock-walled, some forty or fifty yards in diameter and as many yards deep. Its bottom was covered with fine, loose sand, a strange circumstance in a country composed of tufa and volcanic rock. Legend had it that the Pit was an old Hopi tank, or water-hole—a huge cistern where that prehistoric tribe conserved the rain. Bits of broken pottery and scattered beads bore out this theory, and round the tank lay the low, crumbling mounds of what had once been a village. ”

“ The pit is 30 inches deep and 18 feet in diameter. In the center is a fire pit. In the floor are also four holes, forming a large square, in which the roof supports once stood. The walls of the pit were formerly plastered with a thick layer of mud, but only a few patches of this remain. Around the edge of the room, at floor level, were a number of small storage bins made of thin stone slabs. No side entrance was located during excavation. In some of the pit houses evidence has shown that entrance was often made by means of a ladder through the smokehole in the roof. ”

“ Several of the largest trees, well over a foot in trunk diameter, grow at the lower limestone outcrop. Ash is most abundant at this level and at the terrace just below it. On the one slope where it is concentrated, ash is one of the most common trees, growing in association with American elm, chestnut oak, black oak, and shagbark hickory. This area is one of the most mesic on the Reservation. The soil is usually damp, with thick leaf litter and rich humus. In hilltop fields, formerly cultivated or pastured, saplings of white ash are among the most prominent invaders. ”

“ But that was near an alder, and not an elder, tree; and, so far as is known, the pit which leads to the Elder Cave has no associations so tragic as those which are inseparable from the horrible brutalities of "Titus Andronicus." Its mouth is not covered with "rude growing briars," nor are there upon the leaves "drips of new-shed blood as fresh as morning dew distilled on flowers." On the contrary, it is a rather cheerful-looking pit, filled up with foliage like an arborescent bouquet in an enormous natural vase. ”

“ In a pit called Jordan’s pond, in an abandoned brickyard on the east of the road to Stixwould, it is at least 16ft. thick; also, in a large pit in Kirkstead, near Hogwood, some half-mile south-east of the Abbey Inn, which was dug to procure this clay, for “claying” the light super-soil, otherwise almost barren, it is many feet thick. Ammonites and other fossils are plentiful in it, often cemented together with veins of gypsum. Both these pits are mentioned in the Government Geological Survey (pp. 152, 153) of “The country around Lincoln.” ”

“ Pit caves are those where a pit or pits open into the ground, and the ice is found at the bottom. Sometimes there is no roof, when the place may be called a gorge: this occurs at Ellenville, where the roof has fallen. Again, the pit itself is more or less roofed over and the ice is found mainly or wholly under the roof: this is the case at Haut d’Aviernoz, at the Friedrichsteinerhöhle, at Saint-Livres, and at Saint-Georges. Sometimes the pit takes the form of a descending tunnel, leading into a hall or chamber, in which the ice lies under a rock roof: this happens at Chaux-les-Passavant. ”

“ Each one measures and stakes off his ground, and, though he should not begin to work for several days afterwards, no person will intrude upon it. On this spot he digs down, but is not allowed to run drifts horizontally, so as to break into or undermine the pits of others. If appearances are unpromising, or he strikes the rock, and chooses to abandon his pit, he can go on any unoccupied ground, and, observing the same precautions, begin anew. ”

“ Ash woods are cut every year, or rather they are mapped out into so many squares, the poles in which come to maturity in succession—while one is down another is growing up, and thus in a fixed course of years the entire wood is thrown and renovated. A certain time has, of course, to be allowed for purchasers to remove their property, and, as the roads through the woods are often axle-deep in mud, in a wet spring it has frequently to be extended. ”

“ We will suppose by way of illustration that near us flows a river, on the rising ground above which is a pit that we propose to visit for the purpose of putting our apparatus into practical operation. When we have reached the floor of the pit, and stand looking up at the section before us, we are at first rather puzzled as to what the beds, which we see before us, are; for as the pit has not been worked for some time, its sides are partially overgrown with grass, and in places bits and pieces of the upper beds have fallen down and form a heap beneath which the lower ones lie buried. ”

“ When the pit is sufficiently capacious it is lined with buffalo hides to keep out damp, and the valuables are deposited within, even packed up in hide, if necessary. The earth is restored and trodden down, or rammed firmly with the rifle butts, water is sometimes sprinkled on the top to facilitate the settling, and upon the replaced sod to prevent it dying after the injury to its roots. All the earth left over is carried to a running water, or scattered to the four winds, so as to make the least evidences of the concealment vanish. ”

“ It was long ago discovered that, by digging pits or holes in the ground, the rain water, in its steady flow toward the streams and lakes, could be caught or trapped, and that if the pit were made deep enough, a sufficient amount would accumulate during the winter or spring to last well on into the summer, unless the season were unusually dry. ”

“ Ash poles are plentiful, but ash timber gets scarcer year by year; for as the present trees are felled there are no young ones rising up to take their place. Consequently ash is becoming dearer, as the fishermen find; for many of the pleasure yachts which they let out in summer are planked with ash, which answers well for boats which are often high and dry on the beach, though it would not do if always in the water. These beach-boats have an oak frame, oak stem and stern-post, beech keel, and are planked with ash. ”

“ Tool handles and oars are made of white ash and it is superior as fuel. The reddish-brown heart-wood, with paler sap-wood, is tough, elastic, hard, and heavy. It is not durable in soil and becomes brittle with age.
Ash trees are late in coming into leaf. When all the forest is green and full of blossoms, the ash trees are still naked. Not until May do the rusty yellow winter buds of the white ash swell and throw out on separate trees their staminate and pistillate flower clusters from the axils of last year's foliage. ”

“ The wells are ten in number, and the narrow gorge by which they are approached is not ten yards broad. The springs, however, are very abundant. Wherever a pit is dug five or six feet deep, it is immediately filled with water. ”

“ No artifacts or cultural refuse were found in the floodplain below this surface. Prior to construction of the mound a shallow, circular pit had been excavated in the surface of the floodplain to an average depth of 1.5 feet. The sides of the pit sloped sharply downward, and the floor was approximately level. An embankment of yellow-brown sand, possibly composed of back-dirt from the pit, was mounded up about 1.5 feet high and four to six feet wide around the perimeter of the pit. This light sand zone contained a few artifacts but little or no charcoal. ”

“ There clay and dirt may be washed out and the sand and gravel is sized by screens. Conveyor belts carry sand and gravel to the various processing operations and to storage bins or piles on the ground.
A “wet pit” operation produces sand and gravel from an artificial pond or lake. In some operations the sand and gravel is mined by a dredge that floats on the water (fig. 19) . In some pits, a stream of water is directed from the dredge against the bank of gravel to wash the gravel into the lake. ”

“ A pit privy for use in field work, consisting of a framework of 1⁄2-inch iron pipe for corner posts connected at the top with 1⁄4-inch iron rods bent at the ends to right angles and hung with curtains of unbleached muslin, is described in Public Health Report of the United States Public Health Service, July 26, 1918.
A pit privy, even if moved often, can not be regarded as safe. The danger is that accumulations of waste may overtax the purifying capacity of the soil and the teachings reach wells or springs. Sloping ground is not a guaranty of safety ”

“ THE COLD PIT.
Many who have not the advantage of a green-house, wish to preserve over the winter their half-hardy plants which have ornamented their garden during the summer. These are generally consigned to the cellar to dry up and be forgotten. In the darkness they loose their leaves, and when in spring they are again brought to light many are dried up and dead. Properly constructed cold pits offer superior advantages for the protection of many plants of a half-hardy nature, and indeed some that are usually considered tender here find a congenial location. ”