Lara Labryer and her two sons got a little excited after they found a treasure trove of 100-year-old artifacts in a bunker underneath their family’s home.
Lara said she drove to her mother Yvonne Elliott’s house in Grand Rapids, Arkansas, and brought some metal detectors for the boys to play around with in the backyard.
“Pretty much everywhere we went back there the metal detector was dinging,” Lara told 13 On Your Side. “There was one specific area right next to the house where it wouldn’t stop making sounds.”
The home was built in 1888 so it could have been anything. Lara and the boys got to digging and began to unearth several items. They found a belt buckle, old nails, shotgun shells, and even a shoehorn.
“As I dug, a hole opened up and the ground just started to fall inward,” Lara said. “I hit brick, and I started to think, ‘Whoa, what is this.?'”
She reached her hands in the hole and started pulling out old bottles and thought it might have been an underground tunnel system used in the Prohibition period. She contacted archeologist Matthew Daley, Ph.D. who drove out to the home to investigate.
He looked around and did research and found old pictures taken sometime between 1900-1935, showing that there used to be a kitchen built off to the side of the house. Underneath that kitchen was an old water tank cistern.
After the house was upgraded, people used the cistern to throw their junk inside it, and that’s what Matthew believes Lara and the boys found.