Bill D. (VA)
Silver Member
Sometimes A + B does not equal C in this hobby, but it did for me today. I took a break from the early colonial site Dan and I have been hitting recently, and resumed working on my little “project” that I’ve been involved with over the last 2-3 years trying to locate a long-lost early-to-mid 1600s site which even the historical folks haven’t been able to find. In the last year or so I’ve been systematically getting permission from local landowners and searching all fields within this area trying to locate the site, but no luck so far. I was able to gain permission to another area yesterday, and made a trip there in the afternoon to give it an initial walk-around. This particular spot caught my eye after checking out the CW era Gilmer map for this part of the county just the other evening. It showed a nice cleared area precisely where this property was located, but no home was shown there. Based on past experience this was a strong clue that an earlier house site might have existed at that spot. It had a beautiful looking knoll in the back of the property which screamed “early homesite” to me. As I started scanning the knoll I was expecting to immediately find an iron patch and see some scattered brick and pottery. But my detector was almost dead quiet and I thought my efforts were going to be a bust. Eventually I got my first hit, and the little intact colonial buckle I dug caught me off guard and really got me going. It was a slow process, but I gradually started recovering early artifacts, many from the 1600s. These mostly took the form of buttons and buckles, but I finally got a nice surprise when a very early silver coin popped out. I didn’t specifically recognize it, but it’s probably an early cob. Part of the date was showing (“xx17”), and I believe it’s from 1617 based on its looks. Later another nice looking cut reale dated 1736 also revealed itself in the sandy soil. Some other interesting early brass items were also dug during the 2 hour hunt plus a 1600s nipple button. Not sure how loaded this site might be, but seeing how I only covered a small fraction of it and found quite a few early relics there’s got to be more waiting to be discovered in this great looking spot. I also do not believe this is the “holy grail” site I’ve been trying to locate for reasons I won’t go into here. But that gives me added incentive to continue my quest for this site.
Sorry for the pics being out of order, but for some reason pics are sometimes placed in different position in a post than the way they were uploaded. This seems to be a common problem on this site.
Sorry for the pics being out of order, but for some reason pics are sometimes placed in different position in a post than the way they were uploaded. This seems to be a common problem on this site.
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