The sudden realization..

[Detecto]

The first person to own a metal detector in his or her town would of made out like a fat cat.

Can you imagine, in the early to mid 70's, going to every park, school field, etc and finding entire handfuls of silver coins?

Every house would be virgin soil.

 

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[SD51]

You're right on... started detecting in'76. Remember hunting a park that was adjacent to a grade school in a small town. The park had never been detected. Silver everywhere! Got bummed when it started to sleet and snow so I headed over to the park's only picnic shelter. The mercury dimes were 1 to 2 inches deep in the soft dirt. Hated to leave there that day...

 

[relicmeister]

As awesome as that had to be, I tend to imagine the all the virgin cellar holes and fields , where the colonial finds would be relatively speaking just
As old and just as historically important-
Yet so much more readily plucked from
The ground.

 

[Deft Tones]

Too bad detecting videos were not made back then. That would be a treat to watch!

 

[Tom_in_CA]

You're right on... started detecting in'76. Remember hunting a park that was adjacent to a grade school in a small town. The park had never been detected. Silver everywhere! Got bummed when it started to sleet and snow so I headed over to the park's only picnic shelter. The mercury dimes were 1 to 2 inches deep in the soft dirt. Hated to leave there that day...

I too started in 1976. However, there'd been md'ing going on in my town for 10 yrs. by then. And ... stupid me (with nothing but my bike for transportation, since I wasn't old enough to drive yet), went to the same tired sad spots. But we still got silver. Because the machines of that day had no disc, and didn't go deep. And you'd miss something if you didn't get your coil right over it. But when discriminators came out in the late 1970s, .... within a few years..... all the easy 4-star silver gimmees got plucked out of the obvious spots, as everyone rushed to cherry pick silver

When I could finally drive as a senior in high school (1980) we did make some drives to smaller towns, and found some parks and such with very little pressure. But again, detector depth still was not very deep. So the going was still not as fast as you might think.

In the early 1990s we found a virgin country picnic site, and .... by the time we were done ... had about 150 coins. The NEWEST coin was early 1920's mercs. Everything was seateds, barbers, Vs, early buffalos, early wheaties and mercs, etc.... Even a key date CC $5 gold. No junk at all. Talk about fun !

 

[Professor of Engineering]

Tom, I sure wish I'd stumble upon something as you describe, but atlas with all the technology of today at our finger tips most have been detected in some form. Still can hope/look!

 

[DetectingGodlikeOnOlympus]

The first person to own a metal detector in his or her town would of made out like a fat cat.

Can you imagine, in the early to mid 70's, going to every park, school field, etc and finding entire handfuls of silver coins?

Every house would be virgin soil.

I knew lots of those guys, and have seen their collections. For the most part the modern era of metal detecting is a dessicated shadow of what it once was. I see so many people posting a lonely silver dime and saying "it's not hunted out!", but it IS hunted out when you consider that a person has to dig junk all day long to get that lonely silver dime.

It's a hobby of diminishing returns, and there is no getting around it. I still have lots of fun and make good finds, but I abandoned the City Park years ago.

 

[Tom_in_CA]

I knew lots of those guys, and have seen their collections. For the most part the modern era of metal detecting is a dessicated shadow of what it once was. I see so many people posting a lonely silver dime and saying "it's not hunted out!", but it IS hunted out when you consider that a person has to dig junk all day long to get that lonely silver dime.

It's a hobby of diminishing returns, and there is no getting around it. I still have lots of fun and make good finds, but I abandoned the City Park years ago.

There are different frontiers now. But the day and age of pulling silver from turfed parks, has become very difficult in some regions. In my region, for instance, the beginner is simply not going to go to turfed parks and expect to get silver. They're going to have a tough time indeed. Not sure about other parts of the USA.

I remember when .... in the main park in the middle of our city , you could take a beginner there to train them. And on their first day, they could usually expect to at least get wheaties, if not a silver dime. And a proficient user would routinely pull 4 to 8 silver @ at a pop. That was the very late 1970s into the early 1980s. But pity the poor fellow today who tries to go there now and pull silver. Not only were all the easy-4-star classic deepie signals cherry-picked, but you now have:

a) 30 to 35 yrs. of clad added.

b) 30 to 35 yrs. of foil and tabs added

c) the silver is simply all the more deeper (go figure, in 1981 to 82-ish, silver had only been out of circulation for 20-odd years)

Nowadays, even the most hardcore turf-hunters would be doing good to eek out an added silver dime from the sea of zinc and foil. If a guy just darted around and cherry picked for clad, sure, he'd tally up $5.00 no problem. Or if he wanted to angle for gold, sure, he could dig 300 low conductors and eventually net a ring.

 

[Tom_in_CA]

As for the "silver rush" days, I know it sounds irresponsible to cherry pick for silver back then. Ie.: if things were much cleaner and virgin then, why oh why weren't the guys angling for gold then too ? Here's why:

1) back then , in, say, 1980, silver was at all-time highs. Silver was going for 20x face for awhile, at a time when minimum wage was , what $3.35 p/h ??

2) some guys did indeed reason that "we must be leaving a lot of old nickels and gold behind". And I knew a guy who forced himself to lower his disc. down on his 6000 do *just* knocking out iron. He gridded off an area of our oldest park where he'd dug much old silver from. Reasoning: "There's got to be old nickels and gold here too". After farming out aprons and aprons full of junk, he did indeed get a few orange cruddy V's and buffalos (could scarcely read a date d/t the un-kind soil). And he did indeed get, I think , a single gold ring.

In the end of his experiment, he decided that if gold rings were his objective, he'd simply go to the beach (especially after storms wash away the sand leaving only heavy targets). Because we're only 20 min. from the ocean. And he went back to cherry picking