Playing cards found inside wall

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[inksmudged]

My old family home is about 100 years old and is a built on a piece of land home to the family for almost 160 years. We sold the home in recent years but my mother still lives nearby. The new family has found playing cards inside the walls during renovations.

Any idea whaty this is for?

Thank you,

Mandy

Speaking as someone who has lived in a variety of old houses that all required different renovations (from the simple bathroom updates to a complete overhaul of dangerously old electrical wiring) I've found different objects left in the walls for each and every house. According to my mother, who's a member of the historical organization in our area, it was (and still is) pretty common for people to leave things in the walls when building or remodeling a house. In most cases, they are probably meant to be found by later owners as a sort of time capsule/how-do-you-do from previous owners. I've found old tonic bottles and pill boxes in bathroom walls, a newspaper from 1912 in an old bedroom wall, a rusted can of what was probably a "Comet" type of cleaning powder, milk bottles, beer cans, two childrens' books, a tobacco pipe, a broken hammer, and actual writing on the timbers of names, dates, and things like "Helen was here" - all of these were from different eras, some dating back to the original construction of the house and some, like the beer cans and the hammer, probably from the eighties during the last renovation.

That's not to say that the person who left them there didn't have a deeper meaning to the cards. I've heard that it's pretty common to find shoes hidden in the walls of old houses in New England because of a belief that building shoes into the walls would ward off evil. That said, I think it's most likely that the playing cards were simply left as a memento.

If you're interested, here's a link to a forum thread on another site where DIY renovators share the types of things they've found in their walls: http://www.diychatroom.com/f39/things-found-your-walls-46599/

[catherine]

According to my mother, who's a member of the historical organization in our area, it was (and still is) pretty common for people to leave things in the walls when building or remodeling a house.

A friend of mine does a lot of restoration work on very old houses. He's said the same thing. He's found all sorts of writing and objects in the walls or under the floor boards. He will also leave things behind any chance he gets. He looks at it as a sort of carpenter's tradition.

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