lurk
Jr. Member
Although I got my first detector in the late fall/winter of 2015, I really feel as if this is my second season metal detecting with any kind of seriousness and it's already going quite a bit better. I've been hitting it pretty hard (for me) the last two weeks, about 2 1/2 - 3 hours in the evening a few times a week. I also finally gathered up the courage to start asking people for permission and that surprisingly has went quite well and most people don't seem to mind.
The other day I was perusing my old maps and found a vacant lot that had a house on it from the early 1900s that has since been torn down. I decided to look up ownership and an out of town company now owned the lot as well as the adjacent lot and quick phone call later I had another permission. It was already about 6:00 PM when I headed out so I only had a few hours to hunt, so I decided to mostly cherry pick the area infront of where the house used to set as best as I could tell from a 1960s aerial photo I have. Ontop of all the debris from the demolition of the house it seems a construction company has been using the lot to park their equipment, and by the looks of it from the empty cans of food local homeless people like to sleep around the equipment so needless to say a very trashy environment to hunt it. There has been a good amount of rain lately so on top of all the trash my machine was giving me quite a bit of falsing on foil (which I've never had a problem with before) and the nails. Simply trying to cherry pick targets was kind of a pain but I did have some success but for the amount of ground I covered, I didn't recover very many good targets.
Of course I had to hit the Indian with my digger, I'm surprised I was even able to separate it because the poor fellow lost his pocket knife at the same time. I ended up expanding my hole to get the pocket knife out after I recovered the IHP which was pretty hard to pinpoint in the mess of signals. I was running my F75 with DST on Sens 88, 3 tones, Disc 6, DE process. The IHP rang up a solid 64-65 but only in the one clean direction but gave steady tone both directions and was around 6-7" deep. I used my cut down trenching shovel to dig because the lot is only mowed and is mostly weeds so besides making sure my holes were filled I was not concerned with not killing the foliage and most of the plugs crumbled anyway.
Besides the IHP I had only dug a few pieces of clad and a 1944 wheatie from infront of where the house used to sit. Inbetween the sidewalk and curb was very naily and had I ordered a NEL sharpshooter coil that should be here Saturday so I decided to skip it entirely because it was just so trashy for my standard coil and I didn't feel like wasting a bunch of time chasing iffy signals and am hoping to get better separation with the new coil. I knew I only had about 30-45 minutes of good light left so I decided to try and sample the whole lot and wander around. The sampling yeilded some pretty deep round trash items and some clad. On the way back to the car I got a good squeak and a solid 72 signal at around 7" so of course I dug it, to my surprise it was a medal of some kind but it was getting dark and I didn't want to mess with trying to clean it as I figured it was an old timber tag or something of the like and I was hoping to get another target or two in before dark.
After I got home I cleaned it up and it reads CHARLES HIRSCH and has a Freemason symbol with the squares in the center. I assume this is the backside and the "front" side is pretty toasty I wasn't able to get any detail off of it and I am wondering if something wasn't glued onto the frontside. Does anyone have any information about this type of medal? I did some googling and didn't find anything about him or the medal, but did find a grave in the town cemetery that matches his name and the time period of the home. I have thought about maybe trying to see if any of his descendants are still in the area and giving it to them, because I'm sure as an heirloom it's worth more to them than it is to me sitting in my coffee can with toy cars and other stuff I've found.
That's about all I've got, thanks for reading. And yes sadly, the 1891 IHP is the oldest coin I've found so far
The other day I was perusing my old maps and found a vacant lot that had a house on it from the early 1900s that has since been torn down. I decided to look up ownership and an out of town company now owned the lot as well as the adjacent lot and quick phone call later I had another permission. It was already about 6:00 PM when I headed out so I only had a few hours to hunt, so I decided to mostly cherry pick the area infront of where the house used to set as best as I could tell from a 1960s aerial photo I have. Ontop of all the debris from the demolition of the house it seems a construction company has been using the lot to park their equipment, and by the looks of it from the empty cans of food local homeless people like to sleep around the equipment so needless to say a very trashy environment to hunt it. There has been a good amount of rain lately so on top of all the trash my machine was giving me quite a bit of falsing on foil (which I've never had a problem with before) and the nails. Simply trying to cherry pick targets was kind of a pain but I did have some success but for the amount of ground I covered, I didn't recover very many good targets.
Of course I had to hit the Indian with my digger, I'm surprised I was even able to separate it because the poor fellow lost his pocket knife at the same time. I ended up expanding my hole to get the pocket knife out after I recovered the IHP which was pretty hard to pinpoint in the mess of signals. I was running my F75 with DST on Sens 88, 3 tones, Disc 6, DE process. The IHP rang up a solid 64-65 but only in the one clean direction but gave steady tone both directions and was around 6-7" deep. I used my cut down trenching shovel to dig because the lot is only mowed and is mostly weeds so besides making sure my holes were filled I was not concerned with not killing the foliage and most of the plugs crumbled anyway.
Besides the IHP I had only dug a few pieces of clad and a 1944 wheatie from infront of where the house used to sit. Inbetween the sidewalk and curb was very naily and had I ordered a NEL sharpshooter coil that should be here Saturday so I decided to skip it entirely because it was just so trashy for my standard coil and I didn't feel like wasting a bunch of time chasing iffy signals and am hoping to get better separation with the new coil. I knew I only had about 30-45 minutes of good light left so I decided to try and sample the whole lot and wander around. The sampling yeilded some pretty deep round trash items and some clad. On the way back to the car I got a good squeak and a solid 72 signal at around 7" so of course I dug it, to my surprise it was a medal of some kind but it was getting dark and I didn't want to mess with trying to clean it as I figured it was an old timber tag or something of the like and I was hoping to get another target or two in before dark.
After I got home I cleaned it up and it reads CHARLES HIRSCH and has a Freemason symbol with the squares in the center. I assume this is the backside and the "front" side is pretty toasty I wasn't able to get any detail off of it and I am wondering if something wasn't glued onto the frontside. Does anyone have any information about this type of medal? I did some googling and didn't find anything about him or the medal, but did find a grave in the town cemetery that matches his name and the time period of the home. I have thought about maybe trying to see if any of his descendants are still in the area and giving it to them, because I'm sure as an heirloom it's worth more to them than it is to me sitting in my coffee can with toy cars and other stuff I've found.
That's about all I've got, thanks for reading. And yes sadly, the 1891 IHP is the oldest coin I've found so far
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