Warrior Basin Treasure Hunters Blog

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

Here is my first Indian Head (buffalo nickel) it is a 1936. I hope it is clear enough to see. I found it at old Jonesboro school Fri. morning. went back sat. morning with Gary and just found clad this trip.Gary found a wheatie.See you at the meeting

Steve Love and I went to the fort late Saturday morning to hunt with James on the old military reserve on the other side of the mountain from the base.  The weather was great and we had a nice good day hunting.  This was Steve’s first time to the fort and first time to hunt in the woods.  We hoped he would also find his first silver coin there, but it just didn’t happen.  Maybe next time.

Anyway, James was there for some time before we arrived and had already found silver.  I soon found a nice sterling silver St. Christopher medalion with a broken silver chain still attached.  We hunted a couple of different areas but just didn’t find a whole lot.  I did come up with a merc dime and a buffalo nickel.

 Don and Eddie invited me to hunt the Elyton (?) projects with them yesterday afternoon. I was eager to try some new settings for trashy sites and was sure that more than a few silver coins would be coming home with me but alas, it was not to be. I did manage 8 wheats and Eddie found a few wheats and a cool medallion of some kind.

After deciding to call it quits I headed for Debardeleben to search for real treasure (old coins). About an hour after getting there I got a good high tone hit mixed with iron but this was different than other mixes as it seemed to confuse the Explorer. The pinpoint sounded good for the depth so I dug a plug and found nothing. I scanned the hole again with the coil and got the same mix of tones but the pinpoint had moved about 3″ towards my feet. After enlarging the initial hole I saw a wheat lying on the bottom and said “Rats! Another wheat!”, (I had dug two others just prior) but before covering the hole I scanned it with the probe and got a silver high tone. I removed more dirt and found a 43′ merc and thought, “hmmm, could there be another!”. I probed the hole again and got another silver high tone. After removing a little more dirt I found a 42′ mercury.  As I’m looking at the dime and thinking “wow, this has never happen before”, a guy comes up to me and asked if I was doing any good. With muted excitement I said yes and told him what happened. He asked if he could hold the coin and I handed it to him and then the *%$&^# runs off with it!…………………………………………………nah, but he did do the unspeakable, he rubbed it! Of course I said rather bluntly, ‘don’t do that!! then apologized. He really seemed interested in getting a detector and I told him about the club meetings and web site. So I had two firsts yesterday. First time I’ve found two silvers in one hole and the first and LASTtime I’ll let some plebeian hold my just found silver coin.

Gary