Think back. Way back. Before John Gibbons was a twinkle in his mother’s eye, before Babe Ruth took his first breath, back to 1853, when the only Blue Jays were in the beech trees, and Lake Ontario lapped the wharves just south of Front St. When the railway came to town that same decade, they needed land downtown, and so the harbour was filled in with coal ash and garbage and the city grew south, into the lake.

In the 1980s, that new land was dug up to build Rogers Centre, and archeologists sifted through the spoils. Here’s what they found.

What did they dig up?

The archeology firm of Mayer, Pihl, Poulton and Associates (which no longer exists) monitored the excavation in 1986. Some of the more interesting artifacts went into a display that you can still find in a mostly shuttered wing on the second floor of the Rogers Centre. The more utilitarian bits — 50 boxes of glass bottles, and ceramics – wound up at the city’s museum storage facility.

LEATHER BOTTLE — The Toronto Historical Board commissioned the monitoring work, along with CN Realty, as a model for development agreements and to “demonstrate that archeological mitigation can be performed during major urban construction projects with little or no inconvenience to the developers or the subcontractors.” Plus, you could find neat things, like this 19th-century leather bottle.

TELESCOPE — Just south of Front St., between Spadina and John St., were Lake Ontario and a series of wharves. The archeologists found several nicer items, like this gilded pocket telescope, in the lake sediment on the southern edge of the navy wharf, suggesting a few things may have fallen into the lake. A government wharf that was sometimes called the King’s wharf, it seems to have fallen out of use by 1833.

DOLL FACE — In 1852, the Grand Trunk Railway submitted a plan for a rail corridor from Spadina to the Don River, but they needed to extend Toronto’s land into the lake by building a wooden cribwork and filling it with dirt and garbage, like this broken doll’s face. By 1857, tracks were laid where the old wharves used to be and landfill continued. Gentry left, and the “whole waterfront became industrial and commercial for 150 years,” says Scott James, then the director of the Toronto Historical Board.

SODA BOTTLE — The garbage thrown in the lake told its own story of Toronto’s manufacturing scene. This soda bottle from the James Matthews company would have been produced between 1878 and 1907. Matthews made soda water in west-end Toronto, notes Alex Avdichuk, supervisor of collections and conservation with the city.

MARMALADE — Some of the excavation was done by hand, but during the heavy-machinery part of the dig, the archeologists would signal the operators when they saw something interestingthen wade in, in full hazard gear. “They were going a mile a minute because they had some really tight timelines here and basically they were letting us do this work, but there really wasn’t a legislated mandate that forced them to do that,” says archeologist Robert Pihl, originally with the firm who did the monitoring.There were “strict limits to what they’d allow us to do.”

CANNON — This 18th-century French cannon was one of the most exciting finds. It had been made unserviceable before it was dumped in Lake Ontario in the 19th century, the barrel filled with molten iron. Archeologists believed it was a condemned artillery piece used as a bollard for mooring ships. It now resides in the Rogers Centre, in a room filled with historical knick-knacks, from signed Ricky Martin posters to Jays memorabilia, like a Carlos Delgado nesting doll.

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GINGER BEER — Another example of Toronto’s industry was found in the ample Victorian-era garbage. This ginger-beer bottle from the late 19th century comes from mineral-water manufacturers James and Peter Clark. The business was established in 1879, originally at 229 Queen St. W. “The artifacts show Toronto was largely self-reliant by the 1880s because most of the items uncovered were made or bottled here,” a city official said in 1988.

TEA CUP — David Robertson, a senior archeologist at Archeological Services, says the landfill projects of the late 19th century used a combination of garbage and coal ash because everyone was heating their homes with coal in those days, and there was a lot of waste product. According to the report, a large collection of ceramics, along with glass containers, was found in the 1894-1899 landfill area south of the Esplanade cribwork.

Anything else?

In 1987, it came to light that some of the SkyDome bigwigs had given away artifacts to important visitors.

“If an important person wants to take a piece of ceramic or something, we let them, it’s no big deal,” Chuck Magwood, the president of the Stadium Corp of Ontario, told the Star at the time.

Historian and writer Pierre Berton was incredulous. “I don’t think it’s right for the SkyDome to hand out these things to any Tom, Dick, and Harry they choose,” he said.

The next day, Magwood clarified that a “maximum of five” items had been given away, but they were basically “garbage” — dirt-encrusted bottles and the like.

By 1988, any bad blood between the heritage community and the Dome was gone. The SkyDome was given an “Award of Merit” from the Toronto Historical Board for letting archeologists sift through the site before bulldozers were brought in.