A prescription, a shoe and child-sized cups: What was found beneath Brantford

A few of the nearly 400,000 artifacts unearthed from a site along Colborne Street in Brantford are pictured on Friday, Feb. 12, 2016.

A leather shoe likely manufactured in the 1850s or 1860s.

A bottle of medication that was prescribed more than 100 years ago.

Aboriginal materials dating back to approximately 500 BC.

And that’s just the start.

“We haven’t even gotten to a lot of it yet,” says archeologist Paul Racher.

What Racher is referring to is the collection of items – nearly 400,000 in total – found beneath demolished buildings on the south side of Brantford’s Colborne Street.

Construction of an athletic centre and multipurpose space to be shared between Wilfrid Laurier University and the YMCA was halted for more than a year as a team of archeologists worked to find everything they could at the site.

Racher says Colborne represented the biggest treasure trove of archeological artifacts found anywhere in Ontario since the construction of the SkyDome – now the Rogers Centre – in the 1980s.

He credits that to a unique feature of the site itself. Because it consisted of a steep slope, he says, it was never used for farming, which typically harms materials buried below the surface.

“It hasn’t been turned over. It hasn’t been disturbed. It’s just sitting there waiting for us,” he says.

“All the periods of history that Brantford has gone through are represented there.”

A glass bottle stamped with 'Brantford' and other words was one of nearly 400,000 archeological finds beneath the future home of an athletic complex on Colborne Street in that city.

Over the centuries, that downtown section of Colborne Street has been a key part of every settlement in the Brantford area.

Long before Europeans arrived in North America, aboriginal communities settled there for centuries.

Joseph Brant founded a new aboriginal settlement near the river in the late 18th century, which eventually evolved into – and gave its name to – today’s Brantford.

All of those time periods are represented in the items found during the archaeological dig.

Racher says a spearpoint and fragments of jewelry are among the artifacts that date back to the period between 500 BC and the first century AD.

Other finds include a leather shoe believed to be from the 1850s or 1860s and kept remarkably well preserved, child-sized cups containing quotations from Benjamin Franklin and the Bible, and pottery fragments that still have remnants of dried food visible on them.

“We can actually analyze the starches in that to determine what they were eating,” Racher says.

This leather shoe is believed to have been produced in the 1850s or 1860s. It was found during an archeological dig of a site along Colborne Street in Brantford. (Krista Simpson / CTV Kitchener)

Some of the other items have more obvious and specific ties to Brantford.

A pharmacy bottle contains a “legible prescription” from a company that operated in the city between the 1870s and the 1900s, while a number of glass bottles are stamped with the city’s name.

Also found during the dig is a “Tiffin token” – a coin a local shopkeeper used as what Racher calls “almost the early version of Canadian Tire money.”

Even though many of the items have been catalogued, Racher expects there to be “plenty of gems” among the artifacts yet to be sorted through.

It’s a lengthy process, as his team is used to going through about 1,000 artifacts in a day – only a small fraction of the find beneath Colborne Street.

Once the items have been washed, preserved, photographed and curated, the most interesting of the lot will likely be displayed for the community in some fashion.