I went out detecting for the first time of the season last weekend. I'm at college up in Oswego, NY, and don't get the time or option of doing much detecting up here. I do however detect avidly when I'm home, in Niagara County. I went home for a nice relaxing weekend and decided to do a little detecting. The Niagara Frontier is an exciting place to detect, first occupied by the French in the latter quarter of the 1600s, it was a contested area during the French and Indian War. The Niagara Region was later occupied by the bristish, handed over to the American after the revolution, taken back by the British during the War of 1812, then taken permanently by the Americans in 1815. The area has been settled since the early 1800s, with a few exceptions, in lodgings, taverns, carriage stations, suttleries and military posts from before 1800. At any rate, there is always many opportunities to detect in Niagara County. My mother had been talking to a friend of hers and he said that the church that sits on his property was moved from down the road on a corner, and that the corner (now a farmer's field) had been a church site since the 1840s. The field is basically in a the boondocks. Not a whole lot around, only a few houses within site. Just fields, and a house across the street on the old country intersection. I was skeptical of what I'd find there. It's so often that us detectorists need to have a little vision. Its hard to imagine fabled camp, fort, house or church sites where there is nothing but corn stalks from the previous fall. At any rate, I detected there and immidiately found what I suspect is the base of something (a cane, furniture, a tripod) and its copper, so I knew that it wasn't just a field. This find was followed by a cufflink, which excited me more. The next signal I had was very very shallow. I probed the dirt a little with my fingers and out came a coin! It turned out to be a King George III large cent. One pence I suppose. Very worn, with a lot of chemical deposit from the fertilizer, but my first. Very interesting to find it on a site that was supposed to only have been used as a church in the mid 1800s. I went on to find 3 more buttons, some nicely decorated. I also found a few musketballs, though not the .69 caliber of the Bess, small shot, maybe .35 cal. Interesting and fun enough for 2 hours of detecting. One can never rule out anything in this hobby. I have a feeling that the site may have been occupied long before 1840. Intersections now have usually been some form of intersection for a long time. Who knows. The site deserves much more investigation. I'll post some pics when I get home from school. Remember, it doesn't hurt to just get permission to detect a couple of fields, look for ceramics and stones on the surface, swing the detector for a little bit. You never know what you might discover! -------Adrian

• Re: intersections, corn fields, local lore, and a little vision Dan in In 15:26:15 5/02/2000 (1)
  • Re: intersections, corn fields, local lore, and a little vision Jack (MA) 03:20:27 5/04/2000 (0)