Secrets wait beneath soil. Gently inserting a 4’ steel probe through a layer of ash, Ezra Lane pushed down 2’, felt hard resistance, and heard a telltale report run up the shaft. Not the clink of glass, nor the clang of metal, but the dull thud of stoneware.
Lane’s mouth dried to cotton. “It sounded good. So good. I couldn’t be certain, but somewhere inside I already knew we would make the find of a lifetime.”
Out of the ground, Lane pulled an intact cache of stoneware—nine whiskey jugs buried roughly 100-150 years in the past, with the prize specimen possibly worth several thousand dollars. Find of a lifetime, indeed.
“You want to know how to find treasure?” Lane asks. “It takes dirty elbows and sweat, but first you find it in your mind. The magic is real.”
Relic Obsession
Surrounded by the lore and lost hollers of the southern Ozarks in northcentral Arkansas’ Baxter County, roughly 15 miles below the Missouri line in Mountain Home, Ezra Lane, 26, keeps a nose in the dirt.
Raised alongside the Trail of Tears historic road, a skip from the confluence of the White and North Fork rivers, Lane caught artifact fever as a child sorting the layers of a 1930s bottle dump behind his family’s rural property. At 6, after Lane’s parents bought him a metal detector, the boy’s relic obsession raged.
“It turned into a hunt for life and love of history for Civil War artifacts, arrowheads, glassware, old signs, coins, pre-1880 bottles, and so much more. The older I got, the more I learned that finding artifacts takes preparation. To this day, I put in a lot of research before a hunt.”
Whether farmland, creeks, mills, homesteads, or dumps, the clues to artifact sites abound. Typically, Lane spends hours poring over vintage maps and newspaper clippings. “Old settler accounts have lots of nuggets that help find forgotten places. For sure, I also study old maps for wooded places beside towns. Those woods are sometimes there because the terrain wasn’t habitable. If so, that’s a strong possibly for a waste site and a place people dumped their trash dating back to whenever the area was settled.”
However, preparation doesn’t displace intuition. “Before any hunt, I ask myself, ‘If I find just one item today, what do I want it to be?’ It’s a way of sincerely believing I’ll find something. Kinda like speaking it into existence. People will believe what they will, but for me, you need that mindset to make your own fortune. All I can say is, ‘It works.’”
And in November 2025, it worked to perfection.
X Marks the Spot
He knew. He knew the ground would surrender something special. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had this gut feeling earlier that morning that this was the day to find something awesome.”
Two hours from Mountain Home, in late afternoon, Lane hot-nosed a trail of vintage bottles down a low-lying creek, alongside his brother, Eli, and hunting buddy, Brandon. Wearing hiking boots, shorts, and t-shirt, and strapped with a backpack, Lane carried his requisite probe, shovel, and a two-pronged extraction tool.
Characterized by poorly-drained terrain, the area hid a century-plus-old dump site. “It’s fair to describe the place as nasty,” Lane says. “It’s almost swampy and smells miserable. We parked our truck about a quarter mile away and walked in.”
A stone’s throw from the creek, Lane noted streaks of exposed, black soil. Ash and soot.
“It’s an easy, easy clue. Back in the days of wood-burning stoves, large amounts of ash got thrown in the trash, or there was burning going at the dump sites. Either way, it’s a strong indicator of artifacts.”
Losing daylight, Lane began probing in the ash layer. X marks the spot.
“I stuck my metal probe in the ground and at first, all I could hear was the sound of it going through ash and back into dirt. Then a thud. A solid thud.”
Grabbing the shovel, Lane carefully dug a test hole approximately 2’ down, gingerly scraping away the final inches of soil as a patch of cream-colored glaze emerged from the dark dirt: a 2-gallon stoneware whiskey jug caught light for the first time in over a century.
“We could see the curvature and knew exactly what it was instantly,” Lane recalls. “The digging was really easy because the dirt was loose, and I could reach around it and feel the handle. If the handle is there, you know it’s a good situation, because normally that’s the easiest piece to break off a jug.”
Scratching along the jug’s edges, Lane lifted the jug with a final tug—and stared deeper into the cavity with astonishment. Another jug. And another.
His heartbeat thumped like the hindfoot of a rabbit. “No way. No way. It’s not supposed to happen this good or fast. This wasn’t a good spot to dig, it was fantastic.”
Hidden behind the initial find were more jugs. Too many to count.
“In about four minutes, we had four jugs pulled out. And there was a bunch more exposed in the hole. No question, we’d stumbled on a once-in-a-lifetime cache. And the best was still in there.”
One Jug to Rule Them All
Brother Eli was next at the hole.
Sweeping away more dirt, Eli exposed white glaze atop unique styling. Excitement building, he eased out a 3-gallon jug and rolled it over, revealing a manufacturer mark from the Memphis-based D. Canale & Co., a renowned Mid-South distributor of liquor and produce, established in 1866.
“We went crazy with excitement,” Lane recalls. “That Memphis jug is worth $2,000 or more, and to find it intact in a hole was like a dream.”
On with the hunt. On with a roller coaster of adrenaline shots. In total, Lane found nine intact jugs and roughly 25 broken jugs.
“It’s hard to describe, but you gotta realize this all happened in about 25 to 30 minutes,” he exclaims.
Carrying the nine dirt-filled jugs a quarter-mile uphill to the truck should have been a slog for the hunting trio. Instead, it was an easy stroll.
“They were filled tight with a clay mixture, and super heavy,” Lane notes, “but the weight was the last thing on my mind. I just had lots of questions about how they got left in the first place.”
Who stashed or discarded the jugs? When and why? Buried in the hole in beside the stoneware, Lane found a clue: Three 1-gallon medicine bottles.
Bootlegger’s Secret?
Corn, barley, and rye birth whiskey. Before the widespread advent of adequate glass receptacles, stoneware jugs (glazed to help prevent leaks) were standard liquor containers.
Lane estimates his jugs at roughly 1880 to 1920. “Most sizable towns had jug makers, so the ones we found likely were somewhat local. Certainly, the marked jug is from Memphis, and the others might be too.”
“As far who left them, my best guess comes from the medicine bottles we found with the jugs. That’s a hint, to me, that maybe a drugstore closed down and dumped all their stock. Just speculation on my part.”
“Then again, these jugs date close to Prohibition,” Lane continues. “Maybe a farmer was bootlegging whiskey and got in trouble, and had to ditch his stuff. That’s a whole lot of intact stoneware to just get thrown out. Makes me wonder if someone was in a hurry.”
The nine-jug hoard is a unified collection—and will remain so, Lane emphasizes.
“We’re not selling these jugs. The smaller ones range in value from $50 to $100, and the Memphis jug has bigtime value, and that’s all cool, but we don’t care. Part of the magic is just finding them together and keeping them that way.”
“They survive from an age when it was seriously rough around these parts. Everyone had a gun, everyone dipped, everyone drank, everyone farmed, everyone kind of stayed to themselves, and everyone protected their land.”
No matter what Lane next pulls from the earth, the whiskey jug cache will stay at the tip of his memory—and fingertips.
“It’s a dig we’ll talk about for the rest of our lives. Some guys can hunt 50 years never find a jug stash like that. Then again, on a farm or in the woods, maybe somebody tomorrow will find an even bigger stash,” Lane adds.
“That’s the fun and beauty in treasure hunting: Incredible secrets are still out there, and today could be the day.”
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
When Conservation Backfires: Landowner Defeats Feds in Mindboggling Private Property Case
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
How the Deep State Tried, and Failed, to Crush an American Farmer
Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust
Ghost Cattle: $650M Ponzi Rocks Livestock Industry, Money Still Missing
