Posted 8 years ago
SpiritBear
(813 items)
It's not like the nice abalone shells a CW member recently posted, but this shell does tell a small story that I do not quite know.
The city had torn up and left open Muskegon Avenue, my town's main road back in the day. Every week (last year) for a few months I'd ride my bike down there and walk up and down the road, dragging my heavy-duty bike along to throw stuff in its baskets and my back-pack.
Sometimes I'd see people with metal detectors. Mostly, though, it was just myself as no one could drive down the road. There were pits 10 feet deep down to the sewers. There were antique pavers used to border the drains. Other pavers had been used as fillers. I found 1 new 'brand' and a few new variants I hadn't before seen.
Whilst looking for anything of interest (and hoping for an antique coin) I found this outside some businesses and homes that lined the street. The area I was in was close to the (historically) richer part (the road is fairly long) where there would have been upscale homes and restaurants.
It's a shell, possibly the now extinct local oyster (apparently we used to have some kind of edible oyster that no longer lives here). My guess is, some chef prepared this as part of a meal and tossed the scraps out. Perhaps there was a fair, and this was from a vendor where the patron ate it and tossed it aside as he went along.
However it is, it ended up being paved over with some of the antique road pavers I brought home (like 30) and remained buried for over a century till I came along, saw it, and took interest.
I never found the coin I hoped for, but an insulator, pavers, and this were good enough for me. It's not some 20,000-year-old shell from a dried-up lake, but it has a more interesting history to it and resides on a shelf in my room.
i love the story! years ago, i found some fossilized oysters near Livermore, CA - Patterson Pass. i had never seen oysters like these though! some of the shells were 5" thick! can you imagine how long they must have lived to get shells that thick?! they must have been some of the longest lived creatures known!
Ho2Cultcha, I had researched giant oyster fossils. None are so big today, but clams can get pretty huge.
From The Future of Road-making in America, 1905:
In many of the Eastern and Southern States road stones do not exist; neither is it possible to secure good coarse gravel. No such material can be secured except at such an expense for freight as to practically preclude its use for road-building. Oyster shells can be secured cheaply in most of these states, and when applied directly upon sand or sandy soil, eight or ten inches in thickness, they form excellent roads for pleasure driving and light traffic. Shells wear much more rapidly than broken stone or gravel of good quality, and consequently roads made of them require more constant attention to keep them in good order. In most cases they should have an entirely new surface every three or four years. When properly maintained they possess many of the qualities found in good stone or gravel roads, and so far as beauty is concerned they cannot be surpassed.
T A
But not one shell is left beyond that one. They dug down 10 feet, and there were nothing but pavers, dirt, broken concrete, glass, and one shell.
There is no sign of crushed shell, either. It was all dark brown soil.