The isolation of one man is another man’s treasure.
The renovation of the couple’s home in Illinois led to the discovery of strange artifacts hidden in the walls, including a still working lamp circa 1904, According to Jam Press.
Emily and Ash Smith moved into the 134-year-old home in Belleville with their two children in September 2017 and immediately began restoring the Victorian built in 1887.
Emily, 34, said the home’s first owner—Peter Martin Romeser—bought the light bulb at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The couple searched the Belleville Historical Society and Ancestry.com to find out more about the house, According to a feature in St. Louis Magazine.
Romeiser was an “incredibly progressive” business owner, she said, and the purchase came just 14 years after Thomas Edison began manufacturing the light bulb.
Her husband, a 36-year-old Air Force major, tested the conductivity of the lamp with a multimeter and was shocked to find “low frequency.”
“I’m too nervous to try it because our lights are much stronger today,” she said.
The renovation also revealed an old shopper’s card under the floorboard, a domino, a children’s game, a tool grinder, and a glass soda bottle with original corks.
They also found a baby shoe from the early 1900s inside a crawl space. Emily posted a number of treasures on Instagram.
“Every time we discover something new, it gets us excited to try and work out how that element got there in the first place,” Emily said. “It’s like putting yourself in that moment in 1887 or 1904 or the 1950s. I also started daydreaming about what was left out there to find. What is still hiding from us?”
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