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Later, he'd be laying on a slab of concrete with his hand feeling around in a hole, and Phyllis would appear - through the basement door! I started putting plates of vegetables down and I started setting up videos, putting my camera on a tripod," he said, of his attempts to see the critter. "For the first two years, she wouldn't get comfortable with me. But a friendship had to be made for Donley to begin the process - an unlikely friendship with a groundhog. That first find began a journey of excavation for the years to come and continues to this day. He approached and found a bottle - it was actually one of the first of thousands - a turn-of-the-century beer bottle from the Dubuque Brewing Company in Iowa. In the mound of earth, there was something that caught his eye, glistening. Soon after, Donley arrived to find a fresh pile of dirt she'd upturned in the cellar-like basement. With that in mind, Donley tried three different times to humanely trap and relocate her, but "she just kept kicking the trap aside."
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Groundhogs, known for their digging and tunneling prowess (and destruction to foundations), can sometimes be a nuisance.
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In 2019, not long after Donley, 60, had moved in to make way for his artwork, he noticed a groundhog scampering across the backyard, away from the building. The structure, then built for a local moving and storage business, soon covered the trash heap and likely a sinkhole took much "trash" further underground. When Kentucky visual artist Patrick Donley moved into his art studio in Louisville's Germantown neighborhood, he had no idea that his life direction was about to change from painting to mud larking - or, happily digging in his backyard for hidden treasures.Īnd he never dreamed that this new passion that he affectionately calls "groundhog archaeology" would be unearthed all because of a stubborn groundhog named Phyllis, who'd claimed the space beneath the basement of the former warehouse well before he arrived.īack in the 1920s, the ground at 1005 Mary Street had been used as a neighborhood dumping ground, adjacent to a saloon that eventually closed during Prohibition. This article is reprinted by permission from. 'Groundhog archaeology' unearths clues about local history, including the influenza epidemic of the 1920s