A groundhog digging in the basement of an old building started it all. Patrick Donley, a Louisville artist, had no idea what was hidden underneath his two-story storage building constructed in 1920 on Mary Street in the Germantown neighborhood.
Donley bought the property in 1995. He had plans of turning it into a space for artists. But then came the day in 2019, when Donley noticed something was digging up the dirt in the building’s basement.
“I saw this pile of dirt coming out from under a broken piece of slab. And I started looking at it, and there were a couple beer bottles, and I’m like, okay, well, that’s just construction trash, you know, they drank when they built the building,” Donley said. “But then there was a medicine bottle. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. And then there were some doll parts and some broken plates and a piece of stoneware and lots of broken glass.”
A groundhog, who Donley named Phyliss, had led him to a life-changing discovery. Donley’s building was sitting on top of a city dump that opened in the early 1870s. For fifty years, until its closing in 1919, people dumped their broken and unwanted stuff in the dump on Mary Street.
When the storage building was finished over the dump, all the discarded parts of people’s lives disappeared from sight, a forgotten part of Germantown’s history. Who could have predicted that almost a century later, a groundhog would lead to all that trash, turned into one man’s treasure…