Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire LOL-scavenging at the County Dump

My dump experience consisted of shooting rats . We would sing the Lone Ranger Tune . To the dump , To the Dump Dump Dump.

Great time there .The dump was on a slope , when the rats quit running we would take a stick of dynamite and work it back into the slope and touch it off. New battlefield .

Also shot baby food jars outta the air. My cousin would toss 'em up ...I would shoot , when I missed it was my turn to toss. You gotta wait for the apex.

Dad would haul a load of trash to the dump and bring back a bigger load than he started with.

That fits my Dad to a T... He was always on the hunt for "good stuff some fool threw away!" He really like old TV's and tube type radios that he could repair.

This post brings back lots of memories of a dump run with Dad!

When i was a kid, all my bikes came from the dump.
Even a metal John Deere pedal tractor.


My dad worked in the oilfield, he covered 3 counties.

On sundays he would hit the dumps scattered around.

I kept tires on my cars for many years by scrounging the dump. My favorite place now is the U-Pullit Auto Salvage Yards. Lot of guys hang out there pulling parts from a list, and taking them to repair shops and such for re-use.

We have green box ( dumpster ) sites around the county, plus a central dump. Before it became taboo we always had freecycle spots to put stuff that was still good but you didn't want. I still have a Dewalt radio I picked up there and a picture frame. I remember dropping off an old couch, and not 10 minutes later it was strapped to a roof rack heading down HWY 2. we used to call it the mall.

Anyway now it's taboo and they lock up and guard the garbage, WTF.

Anti-Meth head provisions.

The dump is the dump (landfill). No scavenging...

The local transfer site however, is referred to as "the mall". .

I just made several donations, more pending as I re-organize the garage. Several items will go on marketplace for a week or so at fire-sale prices and if they don't sell, off they go to the mall. The mall-guy, I believe, also keeps them for a week or so, then into the big dumpsters they go.

The toilet and sink vanity in my garage came from there.

Exactly what a pard and I would do at the Leland, MS dump. I think every rat and fly in the world was there.

Same here,old kids toys,dresser,old vacume, etc.By morning,it's gone.

My dad had a huge collection of this crap. He said he was going to fix it up, but never did and didn't know how in the first place. When we moved them to the city I hauled it all back to the dump again. He complained "They're antiques!" I said "They're garbage!"

There was a lot of nice sh*t in our dump. For many years, I salvaged tires from dumps to use on my autos.

You can tell our area is depressed, because all we have at our dumps is 100% garbage.

I'll dumpster dive with the best of 'em! I love "road find"!
The dump I went to most was privately run.
They had a crew of scavengers that would threaten you within an inch of your life if you picked "ANYTHING" up!

A rich man would redo a room in his home. They would toss whatever furniture was in the room.
They started by donating it to various welfare groups. Then a war broke out as to who got the next batch of furniture....so they just hauled it to the dump.
Then the dump operator wised up and was selling their used furniture around town.
Guys, we're talking "Tell City Maple" etc!
It became such an uproar, the family would send a crew with the dump truck. The crew wouldn't leave until the compactor crushed every piece of furniture to splinters!
That's what happens when you get greedy!

There are always people watching at the dump, I don't know if they are scavengers or workers. One time I watched a nice car pull up and a classy lady got out, opened the trunk, and started tossing. Lots of suits, dress slacks on a fancy multitier rack, a telescope in the box, a rifle scope where just a few of the things the scavengers held up. They were there before she was out of sight. Some guy pissed off the wrong gal.

Our township dump was closed down years ago as it wasn't up to regs. Then some idiot put pcb's in critter food and it was acceptable for all the cows that got killed and buried. We joked about it being the states biggest underground cattle ranch.

An old saying is, "If you want to impress a foreign leader of our might and awesome lifestyle, we don't show them our mansions, we show them our dumps". As a kid we went shooting bottles at the local dump, when we heard some shouting from the direction we were shooting. The father of one of our classmates was inside a dryer, scrounging parts. We shot the other direction afterwards. On our leaving the dump, we were nearly ran off the road by a city dump truck carrying huge chunks of concrete. We learned the next morning at school that our friend's dad was killed by the concrete chunks as the tumbled down the trash heap. No more scrounging was ever allowed after that.

I spent 30 years working for a Gulf Coast refinery and my brother managed the local land fill. After turn around season I've watched crews load and seal drums of brand new tools, lumber, and supplies of all kinds destined for the dump. A company rep would stand by with my brother and watch until it was all buried and crushed. The damn company would rather write it off than give it to the employees.

A local company that refurbished railcars used to allow anybody who wanted to scavenge through the lumber that they threw out. 2×6 T&G and scads of 1×4 T&G. Pop came home once with a pickup load of 2×6×8 oak planking that was removed from an old flat car! It was so hard, we had to drill holes to drives the nails in. ....and burned up several drill bits. That was in the 60's!

There were 3 local lumberyards in town! They finally threw such a fit over the company giving away lumber, the city made them shut down the "give-a-way"!

Once a week, there would be one tremendous fire in the scrap yards! The black smoke would roll up for several hours!
THEN.... the climatologists moved in and stopped the "burns"!
For a while, Rod would go out after dark and light the scrap yard. The smoke was hidden, but the blaze looked like 3 or 4 house fires!
I don't know what ever came of it.

Way back then you had a Pard! That sounds like great times at the dump, Pard.