most caches - mason jars or tin cans?

[gunsil]

gunsil, I've found 150 year old Prince Albert cans that still had paint. They don't rot that quick.

You are correct, I was thinking here in the northeast. Out west tin cans can last a long time, and especially painted or lithoed ones like a Price Albert can. Around here your older tin cans rusted out fairly quickly. I have found many rusted through and falling apart in dumps and in the ground. One other thing about tin cans is that many didn't have lids, making more commonly available glass jars with lids a more likely stash container. It was in years past that if a treasure hunter found a cache he would leave several empty tin cans nestled inside one another where he found the cache as a sign to any future hunters that they had found the right place but just got there too late. Bikerjon, by "most caches were inside caches" I meant that I think most were inside buildings or structures rather than outside in the ground. Good luck you guys!!

 

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[gunsil]

gunsil, I've found 150 year old Prince Albert cans that still had paint. They don't rot that quick.

That can must be pretty rare since the Prince Albert brand name was first used in 1907. More likely your can was much newer, the brand sold the most in the 1930s. I have found the 1960s hinged top cans rusted through here in the damp soil and in dumps.

 

[Frankn]

That can must be pretty rare since the Prince Albert brand name was first used in 1907. More likely your can was much newer, the brand sold the most in the 1930s. I have found the 1960s hinged top cans rusted through here in the damp soil and in dumps.

I remember seeing those cans in use and later as cache containers with bills in them, but they were inside, not in the ground. They were oval, almost flat and they had a tight fitting slide on lid. Just about air tight. They were made to fit in your coat pocket. A bright red color with a picture of Albert. Frank...

 

[Big Bad John]

gunsil, I've found 150 year old Prince Albert cans that still had paint. They don't rot that quick.

If the can is in great condition, it would be worth a great deal of money.

 

[FeS2]

Never found a cache but I buried one. Distrusting the bank for various reasons and wanting 24/7 access to getaway funds, I emptied the safe deposit box and dug a hole under the house below a trap door.

I live in a nearly arid area, and figured folding money in a jar under a house would be perfectly safe for decades. I was more worried about fire, and dug down with post hole diggers. Put a metal plate under the dirt as a shield. This was back in the mid 1980s btw.

One time I was out of town when a pipe burst. Plumber was called to fix it.

Few years later I started thinking about that plumber. Suppose he got my cache. I worried about it for a few months and finally got off my duff and dug it up. This was about 10 years later, mid 1990s.

Cache was still there, sort of. Plumber didn't get it.

Even though I had a metal shield over the cache, even though I wrapped a glass jar with lid screwed on in a plastic bag, the lid had rusted out and water got in the jar. How one leak could have done that I don't know, unless the pipe was seeping for a while before it split.

My c-notes were mush. A packet of silver certificates was a fungoid mass. Coins were ok though. I took the slimy c-notes to a bank that sent them off to the feddies, who reimbursed me for some of them.

Had it to do over again, I'd put the bills in a jar with dessicant, then place it upright under a bigger inverted jar, maybe a plastic one.

I use a bank now.

BTW, except that I had coins in the jar, I don't believe you could have identified it with a metal detector, with only a rusty metal lid. So y'all may be missing small caches of bills.

 

[Old Silver]

when i was a teenager , my dad was paid to haul off a bunch of junk from a mans back yard. we took the stuff that was metal back to our house to add to a truck load to sell for scrap. there was a old refrigerator that when we opened it , had a bunch of pill bottles in the door, we started to throw them away when my dad noticed there was money in them . found over a thousand dollars in 20's and 100's.
dad put them all in a brown paper bag and drove right back and gave it back to the old man.
not sure if that counts as a cache ?
lol

Yeah, that's definitely a cache. And good on your dad for returning it to the rightful owner.

 

[Sharecropper]

Back in the 1980's I traveled to Colorado with some buddies on a mule deer hunting trip. I carried along my Garrett MD, just in case I tagged out early. The ranch we were hunting on was 3,000 acres, and over on the back side was an old homestead sitting up on a hill overlooking a valley. There were no trees, just sage and buck brush as far as you could see. The old homestead looked like nobody had lived there since the depression, as there were no roads to it and no power poles. I was lucky and got my deer early, so I permission from the landowner to MD around it. After spending all day covering the immediate ground around the old structure, and digging nothing but iron junk, I moved straight up the bare hill in back. I had my Garrett set in all-metal and had the power maxed out, when all of a sudden I hit a good target right over a flat rock approximately 2-foot x 3-foot. I laid my MD down and grabbed the edges of the flat rock and flipped it over. There was a perfectly round hole under the rock, and a Prince Albert can laying in the bottom of the hole. My heart almost stopped. With a trembling hand, I reached down into the hole and slowly raised the can out. I then sat down on the rock, and used my thumb to pop up the can lid. To my dismay, it was empty! But it didn't matter, I had found the old homesteader's cache site!

Just thought I would share this great memory from many years ago.

 

[Salura]

What did the Spaniards and Native American Indians use (1500-1900) for their caches? I read stories about some of them being rigged with traps, but not much more specifics to help me figure what they would have used.

 

[THRICK]

I have heard several stories of them using iron kettles...

 

[MickeyMaguire]

Many caches have been found in pottery in the UK and other places in Europe. That might be common in colonial America, too.