Obscurist
Jr. Member
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2009
- Messages
- 46
- Reaction score
- 6
- Golden Thread
- 0
- Location
- Asheville, NC
- Detector(s) used
- Garrett Ace 250
Just back from a family visit to central Florida, the little town of Kathleen in Polk County.
The place my parents live was a homestead from the late 1880s and growing up there my siblings and I found a few indian heads, wheat pennies, V nickels just lying on top of the ground after a good rain. Last year I hunted a 1939 merc and a few wheats.
This trip I wanted to check out the old swimming hole, a deep sinkhole now gone dry in a private pasture.
In preparing the local baptist church centennial in 1995 I had heard much about the services held there back in the 20s and 30s. By the late '50s the spot was no longer being used for swimming and over the next decade or two went dry, testimony to the dropping Florida water table in a lake considered "bottomless" in the days when most of the swimmers were too.
My Pop said the boys would find a nice stand of oaks near the water's edge to hide their clothes and go skinny dipping. The baptisms were done in a shallow pond at the corner of the sinkhole.
One phone call put me in touch with the owner, whose grandparents ran a nearby dairy in those days. I was welcome to come hunt and, as far as he knew, no one had detected there over the years.
Finds were sparse, the ground was very clean with my Ace 250 discrim settings high and sensitivity low.
Within a few minutes I had a clear penny hit just a couple inches down high along the sloping bank of the sinkhole.
I plucked out a green coin so encrusted with sand that I couldn't make it out. The coin would undoubtedly appear to have spent some time under water and the crust on it was as hard as cement. I gave it a good rub with my ground cloth and could just make out Lincoln's silhouette. Guessing where the date should be I scratched at it with my fingernail and came up with 1945, a good year... we'd won the war and local kids would still have been learning to swim there.
Up in the oaks where the bank levels off I hit some loud repeating coin tones. Excited, I scratched away the leaves and plucked a Washington quarter... 1995, shucks! The ground was still beeping at me. A dime, a penny, another penny, another dime, quarter etc. until I'd collected a handful of recent clad, most recent a 2000 Maryland quarter. Pocket spill... it was a fun find, unfortunately a few decades off my mark. From the beer cans in the woods I figured some modern kids had been finding some liquid refreshment of a different kind.
A few other traces of farming, an old valve stem cap, 12 ga. shotgun brass: Rem UMC "New Club" and best of all... a nice, quiet trip back to simpler times. I got a great feel for the lay of the land and could imagine Model T's parked under the oaks near the road and church folks gathered along the banks of the dried up spot, once the center of so much community activity and daily life.
Any stories of hunts at similar locations?
The place my parents live was a homestead from the late 1880s and growing up there my siblings and I found a few indian heads, wheat pennies, V nickels just lying on top of the ground after a good rain. Last year I hunted a 1939 merc and a few wheats.
This trip I wanted to check out the old swimming hole, a deep sinkhole now gone dry in a private pasture.
In preparing the local baptist church centennial in 1995 I had heard much about the services held there back in the 20s and 30s. By the late '50s the spot was no longer being used for swimming and over the next decade or two went dry, testimony to the dropping Florida water table in a lake considered "bottomless" in the days when most of the swimmers were too.
My Pop said the boys would find a nice stand of oaks near the water's edge to hide their clothes and go skinny dipping. The baptisms were done in a shallow pond at the corner of the sinkhole.
One phone call put me in touch with the owner, whose grandparents ran a nearby dairy in those days. I was welcome to come hunt and, as far as he knew, no one had detected there over the years.
Finds were sparse, the ground was very clean with my Ace 250 discrim settings high and sensitivity low.
Within a few minutes I had a clear penny hit just a couple inches down high along the sloping bank of the sinkhole.
I plucked out a green coin so encrusted with sand that I couldn't make it out. The coin would undoubtedly appear to have spent some time under water and the crust on it was as hard as cement. I gave it a good rub with my ground cloth and could just make out Lincoln's silhouette. Guessing where the date should be I scratched at it with my fingernail and came up with 1945, a good year... we'd won the war and local kids would still have been learning to swim there.
Up in the oaks where the bank levels off I hit some loud repeating coin tones. Excited, I scratched away the leaves and plucked a Washington quarter... 1995, shucks! The ground was still beeping at me. A dime, a penny, another penny, another dime, quarter etc. until I'd collected a handful of recent clad, most recent a 2000 Maryland quarter. Pocket spill... it was a fun find, unfortunately a few decades off my mark. From the beer cans in the woods I figured some modern kids had been finding some liquid refreshment of a different kind.
A few other traces of farming, an old valve stem cap, 12 ga. shotgun brass: Rem UMC "New Club" and best of all... a nice, quiet trip back to simpler times. I got a great feel for the lay of the land and could imagine Model T's parked under the oaks near the road and church folks gathered along the banks of the dried up spot, once the center of so much community activity and daily life.
Any stories of hunts at similar locations?
Upvote
0
