Milo Garrett has been knocking down buildings for twenty-two years. He has found rats, pigeons, a live cat, a case of pre-war brandy, and once — memorably, in a Thornhill terrace — a fully functional printing press concealed beneath a false floor.

He has never found anything like this.

On Monday afternoon, Garrett’s crew was removing internal wall panels from the upper-floor offices of the former Meredith & Blackwell textile warehouse on Harker Street — a building scheduled for demolition to make way for a commercial redevelopment — when a crowbar dislodged a timber panel that proved to be false. Behind it, in a cavity approximately two feet deep and four feet wide, lay a canvas satchel containing what appears to be the personal and commercial correspondence of Josiah Meredith, the textile merchant who built the warehouse in 1856 and operated from it until his death in 1871.

“I thought it was rubbish at first,” Garrett said. “Old paper, mouse-chewed. Then I saw the handwriting, and the dates, and I put the crowbar down.”

The cache comprises approximately forty items: letters, invoices, a bound ledger, and several loose pages that may be personal diary entries. The earliest document is dated April 1858; the most recent bears a date of November 1867. Many are in fair condition, preserved by the dry interior of the cavity and the satchel’s waxed canvas. Others are fragile, foxed, and partially illegible.

Garrett halted demolition of the upper floor and contacted the Municipal Works Office, which in turn contacted the Bobington Historical Preservation Society. By Tuesday morning, Dr. Emmeline Furness, a lecturer in urban history at Bobington Polytechnic, had been called in to make a preliminary assessment.

“It is too early to say what we have,” Dr. Furness said, standing in the exposed office with plaster dust in her hair and a pair of cotton gloves on her hands. “But the dates are significant. The 1860s in Bobington were a period of extraordinary commercial expansion — the textile trade, the early docks, the beginnings of the rail link. If these are what they appear to be, they are a window into the city at a moment of transformation.”

Several letters appear to be personal correspondence between Meredith and a business partner in Caldwell — references to fabric shipments, port conditions, and labour disputes can be discerned on preliminary reading. One letter, dated June 1863, contains what Furness believes is a reference to the construction of the original Ashwater wharves.

“He writes about ‘the new quays’ and the cost of timber,” Furness said. “If this is the Ashwater quays, we’re looking at a first-hand account of the Docklands being built.”

Louisa Marchbank, chairwoman of the Historical Preservation Society, visited the site on Tuesday morning and described the find as “potentially the most significant private archive to emerge in the city in decades.”

The demolition of the upper floor has been suspended pending a full examination of the documents, which Furness expects to take at least a week. The building’s owner, Greystone Development Ltd — which acquired the site last year — has agreed to the delay, though a spokesman noted that “the construction schedule remains the priority.”

Garrett, for his part, has placed the satchel in a clean wooden crate lined with tissue paper and set it carefully on a table in the ground-floor vestibule, as far from his crew’s boots as the building allows.

“Twenty-two years,” he said. “Never found history before. Found plenty of rats.”