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GREENSBORO — This is the kind of job where you might turn up an antique Coca-Cola bottle clean enough to take to the Super Flea. And the scuttlebutt is that a worker inside found a stash of silver dollars — of rare vintage, no doubt — behind a wall in the F.W. Woolworth building.

But outside the dime store renovation, where the heavy-lifting part of the job has quickened in recent weeks, this was no treasure hunt for Reggie Burnette and his crew from a small town outside Roxboro.

They are utility men, and this week’s job was to dig 4 to 8 feet beneath the sidewalk on February One Place, named for the date four N.C. A&T freshmen began the world-changing lunch counter sit-in.

Burnette’s purpose is to replace aging water meters for a tap to supply a sprinkler system for the future International Civil Rights Museum. But like any dig this deep in the middle of downtown, the blueprints are no guarantee.

“Everything is old, older than I am,” said Burnette, 56. “A lot of stuff that wasn’t even on the blueprint — terra cotta, cast iron, lead joints, telephone cable nobody uses anymore.”

These are what urban engineers call “legacy” — remnants that simply get left and buried, unrecorded, with, workmen hope, neither voltage nor water running through them. Mostly, they just stay buried under layer after layer of fill dirt, unless a sinkhole unexpectedly swallows a Honda, or someone like Burnette has the need to dig.

With parts of downtown having been built and rebuilt over the last 100 years, water resources director Allan Williams said center city digs have unexpectedly run into old gas lines from a coal gasification plant and parts of old street trolley lines.

“It’s like a geological excavation,” Williams said. “You can guess what was being done at certain layers. But you don’t know.”

Burnette and his crew dug through soft, loose fill dirt and fractured rock until they finally hit harder packed, undisturbed dirt 4 to 6 feet down. It was a reddish-yellow clay, and beneath that, another 40 feet down, is the bedrock that lies beneath the city.

Everything in between at the corner of Elm and February One, all that legacy, took a century to accumulate.

Some of it gets carted off to the dump, some of it buried again, perhaps to be discovered again someday.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com