Old Chemicals

While visiting family on Gabriola (a small island west of Vancouver), me and my cousin found an abandoned farm house. The inside was dilapidated, but its last inhabitants had been there in 1960, and it was very interesting to look through the old letters and magazines. In addition to old photos, letters, books and clothing, we also found some interesting old chemicals.
*Sorry for the image quality, these were taken with my phone*

The house;


Old calender;


Most of the chemicals;


Some perfume/flavoring;


Now we get to the interesting stuff!

Some weird crystals with red goop in them, they smelled like phenol;



Orange pills;


Strange gray pills;


Weird orange crystals;


Some "hand softener";


"Constipation relief", yellow powder, similar to sulfur, but lighter;


Kidney pills;


Magnesia pills;


Silver protein disinfectant;


Unknown whie powder;


A unpierced bottle that is used for injections;


And some cool old skeleton keys;


We also found several jars with mundane chemicals that included boric acid, magnesium sulfate, and potassium nitrate.
I am particularly interested in the contents/composition of the injection bottle, the gray pills, the orange crystals, and the clear crystals with red goop.
I will post more pictures on request.

Quote: Originally posted by 12AX7

The grass, daffodils and roof are in awfully good shape for an abandoned house... Tim

Yes the yard was nice, I think it was being used as pasture for the nieghbors sheep, but the house was in terrible condition. The roof has numerous holes, and almost all of the windows are broken.
Here's a picture of the inside;

This reminds me, recently, I visited my grandfather and began to excavate an old well on his farm that had been filled in with dirt and trash. Unfortunately, most of the trash that we've found so far is from the mid to late 70s, so nothing too interesting, but I did dig up a lot of glass bottles and jars that were perfectly intact that would make decent reagent storage if I could get lids to fit them.
Some of the stuff I found was of serious environmental concern… such as some old paint cans that had rusted out, losing remaining contents, and worse, an old car battery…

Hopefully, next time I go to continue the excavation we could find some older stuff (the well could have been filled in over a number of years), maybe even some old chemicals, although that's doubtful since everything down there was discarded having been used up already.

I've dug down to about 7 feet below the surface, and it's probably a 25-30 foot deep well.


(Sorry for the picture quality, it was a phone picture since I forgot my camera)

[Edited on 4-20-2014 by zts16]