Yellow-painted barrel bottom and timbers (1861 Money Pit collapse)

About This Material

When the Money Pit collapsed in 1861, the Oak Island Association's men were driven out of their lateral tunnel by a rush of mud. Early accounts state that they recovered a few objects on the way. The best known is a stick of oak timber three and a half feet long, ejected by the mud, described in a September 1861 newspaper account by the digger Patrick as stained black with age and cut, hewn, chamfered, sawn, or bored according to its purpose. Found with it was the bottom of a small yellow-painted barrel or dish, about the size of a nail keg. James McNutt's diary from the same period adds a piece of juniper with the bark still on and cut at each end with an edged tool, and a spruce slab with a mining auger hole in it. The Association read these as pieces of the casks and platforms the Truro Company's auger had passed through at 98 to 105 feet in 1849, which they presumed had slid into the tunnel during the collapse. The spruce slab with an auger hole is consistent with that reading, since the 1849 drilling would have left exactly such a hole. None of the objects survive, and the painted barrel bottom is known only from the 1861 descriptions.