Found a 200-year-old chimney sweep log in an old house I was cleaning

I was working a job in an 1850s row house in Baltimore last month and found a handwritten log tucked behind a loose brick in the flue. The sweep back in 1832 recorded cleaning 14 chimneys in one day and noted which ones had "ill-drawn flues" that needed extra work. Who knew sweeps back then kept such detailed records? Has anyone else found old tools or notes tucked away in a chimney?

3 comments

3 Comments

theasmith18d ago

And @claire_walker, that note gives me chills too. It's CRAZY how these little hidden messages prove that ordinary people 200 years ago were just as sentimental and detail-oriented as we are today, leaving pieces of themselves for total strangers to find.

finleyw9917d ago

Read a historian on a podcast once who said finding stuff like this is basically the closest we can get to time travel. It's one thing to read about history in a book, totally another to hold a piece of paper someone touched a hundred years ago. Makes you wonder what little bits of our own lives we leave behind without even thinking about it.

claire_walker18d ago

Oh wow, that is such a cool find, right? I found an old glass bottle tucked into a chimney in a farmhouse my dad was renovating, it had a little rolled up note inside from 1892. The note just said "May this house stand strong" in really faded handwriting, which gave me chills when I unrolled it.