GROUNDHOG DAY: ‘Phyllis’ helped uncover relics, leading to Patrick Donley’s Midden Project museum

By RUSS BROWN • Photos Provided

This is the story about a groundhog named Phyllis, a local artist, a century-old building, and buried treasure. Strange bedfellows to be sure, but stick with me and you’ll learn about the fascinating connection that binds them.

The catalyst of the tale is Patrick Donley, 64, a Louisville native who graduated from Kentucky Country Day, then followed an art eccentric trajectory at Davidson College in North Carolina, where he became a visual arts major. He went on to graduate school at Northwestern, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing before returning to his hometown to begin his career as an artist.

Donley had no idea what lay in store when he bought a two-story warehouse building constructed in 1920 on Mary Street in the Germantown neighborhood in 1995. But one day in 2019, he noticed a pile of dirt coming out from under a broken piece of slab. He started inspecting it and found a couple beer bottles, and thought it was simply construction trash. Not quite. Enter Phyllis.

“That’s when I discovered I had a groundhog,” Donley said. “I tried to re-home her and it was during one of those efforts to trap her that I discovered a pile of dirt coming out from one of the broken pieces. The floor was broken during the 1937 flood because when the waters

receded there was nothing to support the floor and it collapsed in many places.”

(Donley named his rodent resident Phyllis, although he wasn’t sure she was female. His suspicion was confirmed when Phyllis produced the first of two litters with three kits each).

“In those piles of dirt she was kicking out, I found some medicine bottles, shards of pottery and porcelain, as well as doll parts and other domestic items. I began to realize this wasn’t just a little construction trash. So I started to open up other sections of the floor to explore

further and found more of the same everywhere I went. At first, I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t quite piece together what I was finding and how it came to be here.”

Eventually, Donley learned that the building was sitting on top of a city dump that opened in the early 1870s. For 50 years, until it closed in 1919 during the Spanish Flu epidemic, people in Germantown, which was then located on the outskirts of Louisville, discarded a variety of unwanted stuff at the location. As the axiom goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and Donley, with Phyllis’s help, had found his treasure.

“For 35 years, I have been making art from found objects and collage-based paintings as well as sculptures,” he said. “So it’s very interesting that I’m the guy who discovered that his studio was built on a dump. Thanks to Phyllis.”

In honor of Phyllis, Donley -- who calls himself an “accidental archaeologist” -- named his company “Groundhog Archeology Inc.” and founded the Mary Street Midden Project. Midden is an archaeology term that’s a polite way of describing garbage or trash, which is often

a gold mine for archaeologists.

“The amazing truth about this excavation is that almost every time we have dug into the soil we have found something that we’ve never seen before,” he said. “We’re talking about thousands of items, and it has taken a ton of research to even begin to fathom what we were

looking at.”

A small sample of the things he unearthed while digging up to seven feet deep includes bottles of all styles from everyday life -- medicine, soda, glues, pre-prohibition liquor -- along with household products like shoe polish, tooth powder, soap dishes, perfume, cosmetics, as well as false teeth, combs, silverware, buttons, building tiles, handguns, clay marbles, children’s toys from the Civil War era, and numerous broken flower pots. He and others dug for the relics and artifacts until hitting the water table forced them to stop.

One of the most prominent finds was a trove of Louisville Pharmacy bottles. “We found a ton of those,” Donley said. “One of our goals is to tell the story of the pharmacist who lived upstairs at the pharmacy with his family. There were no Walgreens or CVS; pharmacies

involved individuals who were trained and knew how to mix medicines on site. It’s a fascinating aspect of the whole story and a history that’s not been told in Louisville.”

“About four years into the (dig), I had been asked by countless people who were following me on social media what my plans were to do with all this stuff,” Donley said. “I put my head to it, and my heart, and I thought long and hard about it. I have years of museum experience

from many different institutions where I’ve worked across the country. I co-ran a cooperative art gallery for many years, so it just seemed like a natural recourse. But it’s not going to be just a dusty old bottle museum.

“This is going to be a museum that glows with light, that tells the history of Louisville and its people from 120 years ago and how they lived. These are the items they used every day and we will talk about the culture and the historical aspects of every item. If it was a medicine

or a chemical, we will also explore the science behind what was in the bottle and how it was used. Many of the products are still in use today -- such as Listerine and Vaseline -- as well as many of the companies, including Eli Lilly, Purdue Pharma, and Bristol Myers.”

Donley has cleaned, organized and documented each piece for a cloud-based museum catalogue. “It is a painstaking task, but has been very rewarding as we research and learn more and more about the stories behind the artifacts, “ he said.

The two-story building totals 4,000 square feet. Donley is also attempting to purchase the bungalow next door that was built as a family home. Besides exhibitions, plans call for offices, restrooms, a gift shop, and an archaeology dig in the backyard.

The nonprofit corporation is in the process of raising funds for the project. Although no target date for opening has been set yet, the hope is the museum can be functioning in two years. An anonymous donor recently transferred stocks into the company’s stock account, which

Donley said is now valued at close to $100,000.

Donley’s work has been sanctioned by the Kentucky Archaeological Survey based at Western Kentucky University. Jay Stottman, Assistant Director of the Survey, who lives near Donley, praised the venture in a recent interview with Lexington TV station WKYT.

“I walked through the door, and I was blown away by what I saw, because this is exactly the kind of time period I study,” Stottman said. “All these objects are being meticulously pieced back together. All I could think about was, ‘Wow, what kind of information that’s here could be used by archaeologists, researchers, lots of people.’”

Donations to the Midden Project can be made through its website, Marystreetmidden.org, and checks are accepted made out to Groundhog Archaeology Inc. More information can be obtained through the website and on Instagram and Facebook.

And what about Phyllis, the unlikely heroine of this story? The lifespan of groundhogs is only five years, so although she was young at the time of her basement exploits, she is gone, but not forgotten.

“She will be celebrated and remembered throughout the museum and on merchandise,” Donley said. “After all, we wouldn’t be talking if she and I had never met.”