Ames, NY Bootlegger Whiskey Hidden in the Floor Could Be Worth A Fortune
I have lived in a couple of old houses in my life. One was built in 1899 and another from the 1920s and I've always wanted that newsworthy discovery when I was renovating them. I never found any treasure, but when renovating a bathroom I realized there had been a fire in our house...and they never replaced the wood studs in the walls...they just left the charred pieces in there. Interesting, but not a really cool discovery like this one that Patrick Bakker and Nick Drummond made in their Ames, NY home.
They had heard that their house was once owned by a German bootlegger. They even found empty whiskey bottles in the attic. Lending some credence to the legend. According to The Daily Gazette, Nick Drummond was doing some work to the baseboard trim and removed a floorboard. When he did he discovered a bundle of tattered brown paper tied with string, inside that bundle were bottles of “Old Smuggler” Gaelic Whiskey of the Stirling Bonding Company.
So he pried off a couple more boards and found several more bundles of whiskey bottles, all full of 100-year-old whiskey. They also found a hidden hatch in the floor that leads them into an area that contained more packages of whiskey bottles. There's even an area they haven't investigated yet, but they assume it contains more packages of bottles.
So far they haven't tried any of the whiskey (That would have been the first thing I did) but they plan to in the future. They also are thinking about installing a glass panel on the floor under which to display the packages, returning them to, and providing a new view into, the hidden space they called home for nearly a century.
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