found this with the nails still in the head, no wood left of course. found at a pocket dig site that looks as if it has never been detected, redding area. disregaurd the gold in the pic, it is accumulated, only sniped three tiny peices today, to get the skunk off me.
the area just a few miles away is riddled with audits, so thats not a surprize. i was amazed how good the condition was, and the icing on the cake was the two nails still in the head, the wood completely gone, understandably so for a 130+/- year old axe head
That pick head has seen some hard use it looks like.
I found one almost identical to that with my metal detector. It was deep in a concreted deposit that had slumped. The pick head itself was imbedded rock solid in the concreted material once I dug the slump away, left right where it had snapped from the handle all those years ago.
Always fun to find them, and oh, the stories they could tell . . .
no stamp that i can see, it pitted pretty bad. there is possibly a line about inch and a half long on either side of one end. but hard to tell. one side is easy to see the other side is too pitted to know. the one side could very well be from use. cool find though its a wall hanger.