All the digging in Helper for the past three years has yet to uncover any buried mammoths or archaeological artifacts – thank goodness – but that’s not to say there haven’t been any discoveries.
Excavators ran into the foundation of the old Central School during the early stage of the project. It turned out that after the school burned down ages ago, the site was simply scraped away on the surface and covered with some topsoil. When the backhoe buckets hit the concrete, old timers recollected, “Oh, yeah, that’s where the old school building was.”
Diggers also found out where the pipes leading to City Hall had been laid. (Crunch!)
Some streets and sidewalks near the river had been undermined in places, leaving a layer of pavement over a layer of air.
Later, a sink hole opened up near the curb on Ivy Street between Main and First West streets. The old asphalt had been laid over a wooden cistern cover.
And now the latest: All these years we’ve been strolling along the Main Street sidewalk on the west side, unaware that there was no ground under that sidewalk in front of the old Kiva Club. It’s that building with the blue tile front a few doors down from the Balance Rock Eatery.
City Council Member and Public Works Director Gary Harwood told the council last week that the pavement had been laid over an old basement entrance.
It seems that remodeling a city is quite a bit like remodeling a house, where you mutter about the original builders or occupants, “What were they thinking back then?”
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