Antique bottle hunters dig old county outhouse sites

In an era of Whitman County with no garbage service, no dumps and no recycling, where would you dispose of a bottle?

A few of the thousands of bottles Jeff Mitzner has dug up in and around Tekoa. One is a Tekoa Pharmacy bottle more than a hundred years old.

There was also no indoor plumbing in rural areas before the 1920s and ‘30s, so outhouses dotted the towns. They turned out to be a place to dispose of bottles.

Today, a group of antique bottle hunters dig the old outhouse sites, retrieve valuable bottles and sell them to collectors.

Jeff Mitzner of Tekoa has been digging outhouse sites for...