How did a stolen bottle and the discovery of an 1800s-era treasure dump reveal the courage of a young farmer?
Ask Keith Loris, the boy explorer. “I’d never seen anything like it or since. Glass everywhere; all colors and shapes. Hand-blown. Embossed. I’m not talking about hundreds of bottles. I can only describe it as tons.”
With rabbit trails crisscrossing Ellis Island, the Trail of Tears, and Hanging Judge Isaac Parker, Loris’ lost-and-found story is an American tale for all, he says. “Even now, you can still find treasures because farm properties, and even back yards in old city homes, are filled with buried secrets. If you take the time to listen, they’ll speak to you.”
Treasure Hunter’s Justice
When a small family tractor bucked and broke down, fair-skinned Keith Loris listened while his dark-complected father, Gene, muttered in frustration, resigned to a shop haul and inevitable repair bill. As Gene walked away in disgust, Keith, still in elementary school, dove into the bowels of the machine.
It was 1960 and Keith’s ninth birthday, celebrated with a bag of rusty hand tools and an exceptional tractor repair. Bolts. Grease. Engines. The kid was a prodigy.
His mother, Barbara, recognized innate ability. Reaching into her purse, Barbara pulled a $20-bill, handed the money to Gene, and uttered words that spurred her son’s career in mechanics: “Why don’t we take Keith to Sears and let him pick out a Craftsman tool set for his birthday? He’s got something special.”
Indeed. Loris, 74, spent a lifetime in automotive teaching, engine rebuilds, body work, and hauling. Remarkable, particularly considering the gearhead was born into a family of cooks and restaurateurs. “I guess the difference is even more ironic because it all began with farming,” Loris notes.
Growing up on what was then the edge of Fort Smith, Arkansas, Loris could taste the past. As a jumping-off point for westward settlement in the 1800s—in the vein of St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, or Council Bluffs—Fort Smith was a bastion of history: supply depot, mail hub, military outpost, settler magnet, end of the line railroad terminus, and neck-snapping domain of Hanging Judge Isaac Parker.
“Pretty much my entire childhood was spent playing outdoors,” Loris recalls. “The people beside us had an overgrown pasture behind their house. The whole place would have once been on the very edge of Fort Smith settlement. The pasture lot, maybe 2 or 3 acres in size, was partly grown in timber.”
On a spring afternoon in 1963, 12-year-old Loris was playing with a friend when the pair veered into adjacent timber. “The first thing that caught my eye was several rusty cans and containers, so old they were almost disintegrated. Walking closer, I could see colored glass on the ground, between the scattered leaves. Everywhere.”
The boys cut sticks and began digging, picking through the shards of a second layer, where Loris cut his fingers multiple times. He walked home, grabbed gloves and a shovel, and returned to the site, digging into a third level—where the fragments turned to intact bottles.
“It was an unreal quantity. There were pretty bottles of all shapes, colors, and sizes. We were standing on and in glass, but I don’t know how deep this went into the ground. I know for certain it went back to the 1800s, but I can only guess at the volume of glass. I’d estimate there were tons of bottles.”
Sticking several specimens in his pockets and cradling the rest, Loris went home with 12 bottles, his favorite an embossed “Dr. J. Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters,” dating to the second half of the Nineteenth century.
“My buddy who was with me, Frankie, didn’t care anything about bottles and went home. I put all 12 on my back porch and started cleaning them. It felt kind of like magic. Like I had discovered a secret nobody else in the world knew about.”
Roughly one hour later, Loris recalls, a familiar face peered around the back porch—Frankie’s father. “He says, ‘My boy says you found some bottles.’ I answered, ‘Yessir,’ and pointed to the dozen. He picked up the Hostetter’s bottle, held it up to the light, and said, ‘I’m taking it. This bottle has part of my last name on it. You’ve got enough bottles left and you owe us this one.’ Then he walked away.”
Loris was crestfallen. Afraid to challenge an adult, the 12-year-old sat on the back steps and fought back tears.
“In that moment, all I knew was that man stole my magical feeling and my favorite bottle of the find. It was wrong and a mean thing to do to a kid.”
But what Loris didn’t know? His dad, Gene, was about to deliver treasure hunter’s justice.
Under Cover of Darkness
Minutes later, Gene arrived home. Black hair, dark eyes, and olive skin, Gene carried paternal Greek and maternal Cherokee blood. He found his light-skinned, blue-eyed boy, who inherited Barbara’s Irish stock, on the back porch, wiping away a teardrop.
“What’s wrong, son?”
Loris recounted the find and seizure of the Hostetter’s bottle.
Gene was furious, but kept his powder dry. “Keith, don’t say a thing to momma. When she goes to sleep tonight, me and you are going back. Don’t you worry. We’ll find you that exact bottle. Where there’s one, there’s two.”
Swamp Fever Tonic
Flashlight throwing beam, father and son crossed into the back pasture at roughly 11 p.m. and felt the crunch of shifting glass underfoot. Inserting a pitchfork into the ground, Gene began turning glass. “He’d pull a bottle and smile at me, and then keep going to the next one,” Loris recalls.
“I didn’t know it right then, but I’d find out later that we were in the middle of an old hobo dump and likely a farm dump before that. It contained an unusual amount of liquor bottles, and I attribute that to the hobos. Fort Smith was a major railroad hub, and this pasture once was a spot where transients stayed for weeks. No question, it would have taken decades for that many bottles to accumulate in one spot.”
Fifty bottles later—including two Hostetter’s, Gene stopped digging. The duo walked home and cleaned up—all with a wink and nod: You have plenty of bottles now, son. Never bother Momma with where you got them. Never go back there and take anymore.
“I look back now and realize that pasture wasn’t our property, even though the old couple that owned it never went back there. My daddy was more concerned about how I’d been treated by an adult, and he made it right, in his own way, without causing an explosion or a property issue.”
Six decades later, Loris still has all 61 bottles: medicine, soda, whiskey, and wine. “One is a soft drink bottle with a rounded bottom and stopper top. Another is a ‘Schaap’s Swamp Chill and Fever Tonic.’ Another is an 1800s-era wine bottle from St. Louis. I keep them safely packed in boxes.”
“They’re not just bottles,” adds Loris, who serves as a volunteer historian at the Fort Smith National Historic Site. “They’re also books. They tell a story about a farm in Greece and one of the bravest men you’ll ever hear about.”
Greeks and Cherokees
In 1900, 16-year-old Demetrius Loris walked away from his farm in coastal Greece and caught passage on a ship bound for the United States.
Arriving at Ellis Island, alone, with family and friends 5,000 miles away, Demetrius changed his first name to “Jim” and dove headfirst into America: work, scrap, survive. He rode the rails west inside a caboose and learned the trade of a cook. At 25, via the Kansas City Southern, Jim stepped off the train in Fort Smith and never climbed back on, starting a restaurant in the railroad terminal.
“My grandfather was a farmer in Greece with nine siblings who believed he could make it in America. His family had no money, and his siblings didn’t want to leave, so he begged his parents to send him. They saved up for the fare and he came over in the bottom of a freighter. One-way ticket, of course.”
Along a parallel timeline, Hattie Bell Murry, of Cherokee descent, worked at a Fort Smith laundry. “Her family had been pushed out of Tennessee on the Trail of Tears decades before, but her parents had died and she ended up working on a farm and finally working in Fort Smith,” Loris notes.
The stars aligned when Jim hauled his cooking aprons to the laundry for cleaning, and spotted Hattie Bell.
“The Greek married the Cherokee Indian, and our American family is the result of their determination to provide for their children and succeed. My grandfather started another restaurant on Rogers Avenue, and the rest is wonderful history. What a journey, what a life.”
A Chain in Time
Why are bottles preserved on old house sites and farms?
Before plastic, glassware was the ubiquitous catchall for medicine, hygiene, beverages, and more. Homeowners and landowners discarded the glass on-site, in holes, burn pits, outhouses, and wells. Covered by time, the spots were forgotten. Unintentional time capsules.
“Rural properties and old city house lots still have these treasures under the ground,” Loris says. “If you look for the telltale signs—sometimes just depression—you can find things that make you appreciate your life today. Something as simple as an ornate bottle, still holding the marks of elegant craftsmanship, makes you ask questions about how much it cost; who bought it; who drank from it; and who was the last person to hold it.”
Did Loris ever return to the most mammoth bottle dump of his lifetime? “No. I never took another bottle. I was tempted, but I wasn’t a little kid anymore and it wasn’t my property. I discovered it, but it didn’t belong to me.”
“In the end, I kept the bottles after all these years because they preserved a chain in time related to my father and grandfather,” Loris explains. “The bottles speak to me about my father who felt his son’s pain and a grandfather who farmed in Greece and found his American dream. Maybe it’s just that simple.”
Every family has its stories, Loris concludes.
“Maybe your stories are lost right now, but they’re out there all the same, just waiting to be uncovered, kind of like the bottles. If you take the time to learn your past, you’ll deeply appreciate the present, and that’ll give you hope for the future.”
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
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
