How many of you found garbage buried around your place from past owners?

[IXLR8]

You folks find more stuff than I do. But one day I was cleaning up around my shop and found two gas pump hoses partially buried. Neighbors said original owner had fuel tanks buried somewhere on the property. Spent a bit of time with a metal detector and I found the fill ports for what I believe to be the tanks. They are only about 2" above the ground and buried in leaves.
The county has no record the tanks are there.... I'm not opening that can of worms and I'm going to leave them.

 

[gstrom99]

My place has a bunch of old horse drawn farm implements, that survived the WWII scrap drives. One steel tractor wheel has a pretty big maple tree growing up inside it. I'm working on clean up, but it's not a huge priority...

 

[EscapedSuburbia]

Some previous owner of my property loved bricks and chains. I'm constantly finding bricks in random spots. The first time I mowed was an adventure. I took down a large maple and started digging around the stump prior to chipping and found a couple dozen bricks just under the ground. The other thing he liked to do is hang chains in trees. I've found 4 trees so far with embedded chains. They're all healthy but someone in the future is going to be in for an unpleasant surprise when they try bucking them into firewood.

I also have a mound that's about 8' in diameter and several feet tall about 50' from the house. The 80 year old widow next door thinks it has something to do with our geothermal heat pump but I don't know why there'd be a mound for that. I don't have any records of where the geothermal lines run but it would make sense that they'd be on that side of the house. The mound baffles me though. It may be buried junk but I'm not going to start digging it up without knowing what it is.

 

[tomplum]

After the 80s we had weekly garbage pickup. 90s added recycle to that. Before that we were on our own taking things to any kind of a township landfill. Every farm had a ravine out back for glass bottles and cans. Most iron went for salvage ($). I wonder if before the 40s people didnt have all that much that wasn't reused or put on a burnpile. Waste not want not. I've found where they dumped the clinkers from the coal furnace. Coal is an odd thing to find here now. Glass bottles, like mrs watkins tonic and ink well bottles. A giant nest of baling wire. The 60s ushered in a whole different mindset - packaging, throw away.

Crazy. I remember going to the dump back in the 70's with my step dad. He was a mechanic with a home shop. The farm was in his family 100 years. Looking back he took care of it compared to some of what I'm reading here. Drain oil was at least re used by the local farmers for the chains on there barn cleaners? Dunno that would be allowed today. But metal was picked up by a metal guy, trash went to the dump.

 

[riptides]

.....

So, part of issue; ill go to the dump, and so will most people, upto the point you start making it hard on me. You want to limit to 5 tires per year, fine; but the county is going to be fishing 15 more tires from their ditch... I took a entire hot tub in for mom, and they refused it. So, although I was tempted to just throw it off the trailer somewhere, i ended up cutting into like 8 pieces are sneaking it into the trash

Ditto....

I did the same to a hot tub, I tried to use it as a Koi-less pond, but it floated out of the ground during a rain event. The landfill would not take it, they recommended I cut it up and dump it as construction debris. Which I did. Do you know that fiberglass eats steel blades and chainsaws? LOL. Dang that was expensive.

For tires, not my own but left over from previous times, I just try and do the good deed too. Nope, have to pay for disposal. Same for certain electronics and appliances. They even have a special day for chemical returns.....

It's really hard disposing of stuff these days, which is why it stays on places or ends up off the road somewhere. Sad.

 

[MossRoad]

Where we live, we have a ravine along one side that a creek flows way down in. Also an off chute kind of that runs partially across the center. It's a nice setting and a good place to be. Junk we saw over the side in the big ravine was pointed out from the second owner we got the house from. Basically saying, just don't blame us- it was from the original owner. But, we took it upon our selves to clean up what we could see and dispose of. They also told us, there is this strange area here below the shop. Dries out there every summer. I bet there's a sheet of plywood buried there. Nope, that was an above ground pool that there was no need to take away. Strange thing it was never set up there, but 300 feet away. When we first started putting trees in the lower part of the lawn, ran across a pile in digging a tree hole. Well, the neighbor said they had a coop there. Figured they burned it in place with that weeks trash.

Nothing else for years did we find. Then yesterday at the top of the short ravine where I was working. Found something metal. Clutch and pressure plate. On top of a tire and wheel. On top of who knows what. But a tractor bucket full. Egads! Probably more of a rant. Dunno what's wrong with people. But do you guys run across this?

Yes. My parent's bought 20 acres and subdivided it in the 50s. There was a farm lane that ran along the top of the escarpment above a lake that had several ravines. Every ravine had garbage, trees, cans, bottles, barrels, a car!, farm implements, etc... It was common practice to dispose of things by tossing it in a ravine.

There is a county home/farm property near there with many ravines. Same thing.

As for our own place, nice flat lawn. I felt a dip when mowing. Next time I went over it, a hole opened up. I knew there was a septic tank in the area from the neighbor telling me, so I expected the worst.

Got a shovel, removed about a foot of sod, and found a suitcase. Inside of the suitcase were about a dozen empty plastic ketchup bottles and a doll stroller.

Things that make you scratch your head....

 

[EscapedSuburbia]

It's time for an on-topic musical interlude:

 

[MossRoad]

We found golf balls for years after we built our place in 2009. The neighbor next door had used our property for a driving range. I still occasionally find one.

I brush cut a friend's vacant lot in a subdivision for him before the contractors came in to build their new house. I can't count the number of golf balls that shot out. But the worst were softballs! There were probably a dozen! Man those things fly.

 

[EscapedSuburbia]

Years ago my wife and I were asked to drop numbered ping pong balls over a field next to a festival. Kids would run out to find them and the festival organizers would draw numbers and give away prizes. We weren't sure how forward speed and winds would effect them so we bought a couple garbage bags full of ping pong balls and a local farmer let us use his windmill as a target. I'll bet his great grandchildren will be finding ping pong balls.

For years we had a garbage bag full of left over ping pong balls in the hanger. I always thought it'd be funny if a PGA event came to a local golf course... but my wife reminded me that judges and lawyers play golf and odds are I'd lose my pilots license.

 

[Oaktree]

200 year old house in rural northern New England? Yeah, there's LOTS of buried trash here! I doubt there even was a town dump until some time in the 1950s, so that stuff had to go somewhere, and that "somewhere" was behind the house! When we first bought the place I dug a couple holes so I could put in a clothesline, get 6" below the surface and it was nothing but old bottles, cans, shoes, broken dishes, you name it. As someone upthread noted, the worst is the broken glass. We did some landscaping on one side of the house a few years ago, and I probably got close to a loader bucket full of broken glass. Given that I go barefoot as much as possible, that was a hazard that needed to be dealt with.