I lived in Lake Wylie, SC, for 10 years before moving up to North Carolina last year. Only recently started metal detecting, so I'm not much help on locating sites...
yet. I
can tell you that there is an elusive, mystery monument at the bottom of Lake Wylie that people have been trying to recover for decades. Right there on the west side of the Buster Boyd Bridge, sort of near the swimmin' hole at Camp Thunderbird. Before they dammed up the Catawba River to create Lake Wylie, there was this obelisk on the SC river bank to commemorate
something... Or maybe it was a state-line monument, I don't remember, have to look it up.
Anyway, when the lake is especially low, people have actually
seen the thing just below the surface. When the lake is
really low (which hasn't happened in a
long time), the monument actually protrudes above the surface. Unfortunately, the window of its appearance is brief, so there's no time to organize a salvage before it disappears again. Cool. This isn't an urban myth, either, it's just a very difficult salvage project and nobody has pulled it off yet.
Also, I remember that some guy down in Charleston, SC, went metal detecting in the Old Town on the peninsula (unless the guy
owned the property, I seriously doubt this was legal, since the entire area is considered historic district), and he hit a motherload of CSA belt buckles, slave dogtags, chains and manacles. I think he even took some of those artifacts to The Antiques Road Show, where the appraiser's hair just stood on end. Never found out what he did with his haul.
But, yeah, I know that South Carolina and North Carolina are like ground zero for Revolutionary War and Civil War artifacts, not to mention gold. I'm just getting started on my GPAA Mining Guide, and plan to make a grand tour of the sites for this area.
