Civitan Park, Trussville, AL
 

Eddie Bradley & Brian Thrasher

9-7-2009

Memorial day I was able to get out and hunt a bit at Civitan Park in Trussville. Part of the park used to be company housing for the Trussville Ironworks. Some areas have been reworked and I guess fill dirt was brought in so that there are very few signals. Other, seem to be like slag dump sites that drive my detector crazy. But a few areas appeared to have older, less disturbed dirt. That's where we found the beter stuff.

I had contacted a new detecting buddy, Brian T., and he said he could meet me at the park later in the afternoon.

Anyway, I got there late in the morning and began detecting. This park has been hunted quite a bit, so good targets were hard to come by. And then, because of the iron in the soil, many of the good targets give questionable or even bad readings. Fortunately, my first dug target was a wheat penny which encouraged me to dig more trashy sounding targets than I normally would have.  That is usually a good thing to do anyway, but I get too lazy sometimes.

It was a nice day to be detecting, though it warmed up a bit in the afternoon. We hunted mostly in the shade and used bug spray to keep the mosquitos off. I was hunting with my White's XLT-e and a 6" coil. Brian had his Garrett GTAx750 with a 9 x 12 eliptical coil. Because of the trash and iron his larger coil put him at a disadvantage today. The soil was often rocky and most of our targets were at less than 4".

As I said, the good targets were very few. Here's some of what Brian's dug

The only thing we're really sure of is the lower left item, which is a war or tax token. Here's a picture of it after Brian cleaned it up. As you can see, the ground here is not kind to aluminum.

Finding one of these told us we were digging in older soil with a chance to find targets that date back to the time at or just after WW II. I also dug a military coat button of the type used during and after WWII.

Later I found the L.B.I. Co employee tag (see video). The Lacey-Buck Iron Company dug iron ore out of the mountain at Crudup, AL, just north of Gadsden. They transported the ore to Trussville for processing. The Russell Clay Manufacturing token is aluminum. It's like a merchant's token but no value is indicated.

Both of these companies were in the iron business. LBI was in existence from sometime at least in the late 1890s. Haven't been able to find out much about Russell Clay Mfg.

HH

EXTRA: An interesting plant I saw down by the river.
One name is "Devil's Knitting Needle". You can see why.