Sylth
Jr. Member
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2008
- Messages
- 35
- Reaction score
- 0
- Golden Thread
- 0
- Location
- Northern VA
- Detector(s) used
- White's M6 w/ Sunray Probe & a Bounty Hunter Lone Star
Lately I've been detecting a local school. It was built in the 1930's and, while it hasn't yielded up anything old, it has produced a large pile of clad and several wheaties. Today, however, I decided to pass the school in favor of one I'd never hit built in the '50s. I don't detect for long, however; the ground is nothing but rocks, the signals were jumpy, and there were few solid hits. About 2 plugs in (maybe 10 min), I get another signal; after pin-pointing I begin to dig the plug. As I;m digging, I happen to look up, and about 8 inches away from the plug is the rim of a large disk, sticking out of the ground (maybe 80% of it underground). So I grab it, and yank it out to see its roughly the shape of a half-dollar, only about half the weight/thickness as well 
. Seeing nothing on it, I pocket it and continue detecting.
After another 45 min of fruitless digging
, I decide to call it a night and head back to my car. As I load up, I decide to take a better look at the disk; I take it out, and, looking closely I can discern a bust on one side, and what looks like part of a wreath on the other; no design I know of tho. I get home, pop it in my ultrasonic cleaner, then dry it to see what it is. The words on the front read: "Alfonso XII Por La Gracia de Dios" across the top, and 1878 ( 
) on the bottom . Of the back, only "Diez" was readable and "Centavos" inferred.
So, in the middle of Northern VA, I found a Spanish 1878 10-cent coin. Now if I just had any idea how it got there...
. Seeing nothing on it, I pocket it and continue detecting. After another 45 min of fruitless digging
, I decide to call it a night and head back to my car. As I load up, I decide to take a better look at the disk; I take it out, and, looking closely I can discern a bust on one side, and what looks like part of a wreath on the other; no design I know of tho. I get home, pop it in my ultrasonic cleaner, then dry it to see what it is. The words on the front read: "Alfonso XII Por La Gracia de Dios" across the top, and 1878 ( ) on the bottom . Of the back, only "Diez" was readable and "Centavos" inferred.So, in the middle of Northern VA, I found a Spanish 1878 10-cent coin. Now if I just had any idea how it got there...
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; as for its composition, I just looked Spanish coins up on wikipedia; according to the write-up there, the 1, 2, 5, and 10 centavos coins were initially copper, then changed to bronze in 1877. So this coin is Bronze 
