Construction crews in Norfolk come across plenty of junk.
Bo Taylor of The Breeden Company, a Virginia Beach real estate firm, said all sorts of things emerge when crews dig — shards of metal or glass, remnants of clothes or shoes from residents’ past.
That’s what happened last spring, when Breeden started work on the The Lofts at Front Street, a 258-unit luxury apartment building on a plot of land that juts out into the Elizabeth River in Fort Norfolk.
Amid all the junk, crew members found a fully intact beer bottle likely more than a century old. It came from a little-remembered Norfolk branch of the Washington-based Christian Heurich Brewing company that once stood nearby.
The bottle has no value except maybe to a collector, Taylor said. But it’s a way to peer into Norfolk’s past.
“It’s interesting to be here in the city of Norfolk, digging down and seeing 100-plus years of artifacts,” he said. “You begin to wonder, why is it here? And how did it get here?”
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