Last Weeks Detecting Trip Finds, Gary
The items below were found during a 5 day detecting road trip last week.
Most of finds were in city & town parks. My favorite find of the trip was made on day three. It was a large military button manufactured by the American Button Co. 1903-1920. It’s the largest and nicest button I’ve found so far.
Day 1
After striking out gold nugget hunting I tried detecting a municipal field that I’d hunted unsuccessfully last year. I’m fairly sure that the coins I found had been planted. Even so I had to work the field for nearly 2 hours before the first find and then it got dark within 30-40 min.
Day 2
An acquaintance gave me some suggestions on local places to try along with some contact names. His second tip led me to another person who told me about an abandoned 1900s era hotel that must have been quite beautiful at one time. I didn’t find anything there mainly do to the over growth, ground cover, and poison ivy. The first few pictures below are from that site. Later that day I found a couple of large pins at 6+ inches deep at an old college campus city park.
Day 3
Drove about 50 miles to hunt several county parks I’d found using Google maps. I called for permission before leaving on the trip. The first few parks were a bust except for eyeballing Yosemite Sam and digging a few 50s-60s items pictured below. I almost didn’t stop at the park that I eventually hunted. As I looked the park (named after a person) over and the surrounding 1950s-60s homes, I wondered if the track of land with the park may not have been an old home site. Shortly after starting to detect I found some nails, bricks and other clues, but it took almost an hour to make the first good find, a military cuff link button. The next few items came slowly so I left to check out a few other parks but came back, this time I changed from the 5″ to a 10” coil. Within 10 minutes I found the large button and I stayed with the large coil till I quit. All the finds except the Sacagawea coin were from this park. The ‘US’ item is an early RFD lock plate. The locks were sold in hardware stores starting on Oct. 1, 1891 and were used to lock (rural mail delivery) mailboxes.
Day 4
The next day my acquaintance made a few more suggestions on places to hunt. Though both locations were early 1900s sites, I failed to make a good find.
Day 5
During the drive back home I called James and we met up and hunted several places. We ended up coming back to our first spot and I found the items below.
The bent up item on the right is a vintage NYLOTIS compact. Here is what the compact use to look like; http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130182374866&fromMakeTrack=true&ssPageName=VIP:Watchlink:middle:us
The ‘3 Merry Widows’ 1920-30s era tin on the bottom left is my second found in AL. Looks like there use to be more than a few ‘wild folk’ in these here parts.
http://gometaldetecting.com/old3merrywidows.htm
The Alabama 1 cent tax token is made of copper, all the others I’d found were aluminum. The Jefferson is a 43’ war nickel. Yes, that big silver thing is an earring! HH
Tags: Add new tag, Detecting trip finds, GaryD