Featured The Orangeburg Story

OK, I'm back. Will resume typing again.

 

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The homeowner becomes unable to contain his curiosity much longer. After wire-brushing the hinges and lock on the box, and peering at the ornately engraved letters on top, he taps at the rusted lock with a hammer. Flakes of rust fly off, and one piece nearly hits him in the eye. But thoughts of eye safety are not on his mind, so he does not pause to get goggles from the workbench.

Squinting in a feeble attempt to avoid further rust-shrapnel in his eye, the homeowner raises the hammer one final time, and brings it down hard upon the lock, with one solid, well-aimed bang.

The shackle of the lock breaks where he had sawed at it earlier, and the rest of lock falls free of where it had been rusted to the side of the box. All of the remains of the original hasp closure on the front of the box break off as well.

The homeowner grabs his big flathead screwdriver and sets about prying open the lid of the box. After some time, he has a gap of a few millimeters in the opening between the box and its lid on the front side, but the lid still refuses to rise.

Realizing the hinges on the back are still frozen with rust, he gives each of them a hard tap with the hammer, then reinserts the screwdriver into the gap to try prying the box open.

It does open a bit wider - in fact, he gets the lid up far enough to slide his fingers into the gap.

Then he gives a mighty tug, and with a cracking sound and a scattering of rust and dirt, the top of the box flies open. Amazingly, the rusted hinges hold together and work again after being banged on and forced open so roughly, so the top of the box remains attached, though our homeowner might not have noticed even if the lid of the box had flown off completely.

He gazes down at the open box.

It is full to the top.

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...

Mud. The box is full to the top with tightly compacted mud. It is obvious that it had not kept a watertight seal during its long burial in the ground.

No wonder it had been so heavy when he lifted it from the hole and carried it into the house!

But of course our homeowner wants to know what's beneath the mud.

By now we know he's no archaeologist and is unlikely to ever get work in a conservation lab. In fact, some years later he will watch news coverage of the recovery and conservation of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley after it is raised from its watery tomb off Charleston in the year 2000, and he will cringe slightly to remember how indelicately he opened this box. But that is not part of our story.

He takes the box over to the laundry sink in the utility room and attempts to set it down inside that, but it is just slightly too wide to fit into the sink.

So he carries it out to the carport, sets it down on the concrete slab, opens the garage door, and goes around the corner to get the hose.

He turns the hose on and directs a jet of water at the packed mud that fills the box. Clumps of it begin to fall out of the box as the water flows and carries the mud over the edge.

At first there is nothing but water and mud flowing from the box. A rivulet of dirty and rusty water begins to trickle across the concrete floor and flows out into the driveway.

But soon something other than mud begins to trickle with the outflow.

He sees small flecks of light greyish material, speckled with black. A few are also stained orange, from the rust that got inside the box.

He realizes these are tiny bits of badly deteriorated paper, and the black flecks are old print on the paper.

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The fragments of paper are so small and so stained that he has difficulty reading them. In fact, he doesn't pause to try reading them at all, but if he did, he would notice that one clearly says "...ERAT...". Another says "...MERIC...". Yet another says "...LLARS".

He directs the hose jet at the middle of the box and continues to spray water into it. Soon the outflow of mud decreases and more and more bits of soggy, damaged paper begin flowing out with the dirty water. The bits get larger, until they are no longer small enough to be carried out of the box by the water.

Before long, he sees a large sodden mass in the middle of the box. It appears to be more printed paper - lots and lots of it, in fact. In bundles of small rectangular pieces.
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Yeah, maybe I should've changed the color of the font too, for the actual story bits, but figured that might be a bit much.

I'm "winging it" a bit here.

Edit: as you can see, I decided to put the story bits in green font after all, to make them stand out a little more from the random chitchat.

It's a messy story, but I'm having fun with the telling.

 

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Realizing immediately that these are bundles and bundles of paper currency notes, the homeowner's adrenaline begins to surge. There are hundreds and hundreds- if not thousands - of them!

The ones bundled together are more or less intact, but all of the money seems to be in wretched condition. The edges are almost all disintegrated and the paper badly stained.

In fact, in terms of their condition, the notes in the box look sort of like the deteriorated and weathered money recovered from the 1971 D.B. Cooper skyjacking, though these are not modern Federal Reserve notes and they did not fall from the sky.

There are also larger pieces of paper - or perhaps vellum or parchment of some kind. These appear to have been documents of some sort, though they are not legible when first seen lying in the box.
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Lunchtime!

Wonder if I've lost everybody yet? Hmm.