The Dump That Keeps on Giving! 1937s Merc and a 1927 Buff!

FreeBirdTim · Aug 22, 2015

Found a lot of wheaties at my bottle dump this week, but no really good finds until yesterday. I found a 1937s Merc and a 1927 buff! Both were eyeball finds. They are in decent shape, but I did scratch the Merc a little with my digger. The Merc had a mintage of 9.7 million, so I guess you can call that a semi-key date.

The totals for this 1940's bottle dump so far are 33 wheaties, 5 Mercs, 2 Barber quarters, 1 SLQ, 1 buff, 1 French coin and 1 Canadian cent. My best spot ever!

Here's a few pics of the Merc and buff:

against the wind · Aug 22, 2015

Very nice, , wish I could make Mercury Dime eyeball finds,, lol

thrifty76now · Aug 22, 2015

Your mercury dime is super nice.

Msbeepbeep · Aug 22, 2015

Nice sweet silver! And a buff! Congrats!

Rustic · Aug 22, 2015

Super nice finds.

I have a question, I'm really new to the sport, and while I know the location of several bottle dumps, I don't know the best way to go about hunting a bottle dump. Do you use your detector, or mostly just shovel through it, or gingerly pick through it piece by piece? Any advice would be welcome.

basque-man · Aug 22, 2015

Great saves! Guess I need to rethink when digging for bottles!

SilverDreams · Aug 22, 2015

Nice finds!

FreeBirdTim · Aug 22, 2015

Rustic, I started out by removing all the undamaged bottles. I poked around with my digger and eventually found over 150 whiskey and beer bottles at this dump (almost all are from 1940 to 1942). Then I started loading up a 5 gallon bucket with the larger broken bottles and dumped them away from the area. I eventually moved on to the smaller pieces and the only thing left now is a lot of very small pieces of glass. I think I must have hauled away at least 50 buckets of broken glass, so it took time and patience to do.

In the beginning, I was mainly having fun digging bottles and gave up on detecting it. There are thousands of bottle caps and other bits of metal in this dump, so my Ace 250 can't handle it. But then I spotted a wheatie and a 1910 Barber quarter on the same day and the eyeball hunt was on! What I'm doing now is churning up the dirt with my digger and picking out anything round or silver colored. Sounds like a pain and it is! But it is paying off. The more bottle caps I picked out, the easier it got to spot the coins.

Let me warn you, though. This is the first bottle dump I have ever found a significant quantity of coins at. Most dumps are just full of tin cans and bottles. If I hadn't seen those two coins, I would have taken my bottles and moved on to the next spot.

As I stated before, I think these coins were swept up with the bottle caps at the bar that dumped the trash here. Maybe only a few a week, but it added up over time. So if you find a dump full of liquor bottles, go over it with a fine tooth comb! It's probably trash from a bar and you never know what they swept up and tossed by accident. Good luck!

park pirate · Aug 23, 2015

Nice..

Trezurehunter · Aug 23, 2015

Great eyeball finds. Seems like the dumps are providing nice coins this year also.

cjon455 · Aug 23, 2015

great job on the coins!, I gotta ask, areyou just digging for bottles when you find these eyeball finds? either way great job!!

pepperj · Aug 23, 2015

Nice recoveries, have you tried sifting some of the soils from the dump?

BigWaveDave · Aug 23, 2015

I always find it remarkable, especially early dates, whose mint marks are no where near where it was when found....

Pointman · Aug 23, 2015

There are some big scattered 1940s-60s bottle/can dumps down the road from me. I remember in the 70s and 80s them being a lot taller and more defined cause they hadn't settled as much and covered over. I would like to search them, but I can't think of a strategy to detect around them because of all the metal, especially those 60s aluminum beer can tops that I can't seem to discriminate out. I remember finding the occasional cork top or canning jar around them. I found some paper shotgun shells once, still intact and an eyecup.

FreeBirdTim · Aug 23, 2015

great job on the coins!, I gotta ask, are you just digging for bottles when you find these eyeball finds? either way great job!!

This dump had pretty much run out of undamaged bottles. I was almost ready to cover up the broken bottles when I spotted a wheatie and a Barber quarter a couple of weeks ago. Ever since that day, I've just been looking for coins.

FreeBirdTim · Aug 23, 2015

Nice recoveries, have you tried sifting some of the soils from the dump

Not yet, but that's my plan as soon as my current method stops working. There's still a ton of broken glass and pieces of tin cans, so that will be a labor intensive project!

pepperj · Aug 24, 2015

FreeBirdTim said:
Not yet, but that's my plan as soon as my current method stops working. There's still a ton of broken glass and pieces of tin cans, so that will be a labor intensive project!

There's a couple of things that pop out at me and the dump that you're in sounds like a dump that a business (bar/restaurant) used from the high volume of liquor bottles that you have recovered and the amount of glass. Speculation on my part but these coins might have come from floor sweepings/table clearing of scraps and the tip money was accidentally lost. What ever the reason my hat goes off to you as digging out a dump regardless of the age is hard work.

sutphin · Aug 24, 2015

FTB NICE RELICS I SEE.

FreeBirdTim · Aug 24, 2015

pepperj, my thoughts exactly! They swept up at 2:30 AM and didn't notice the coin or two that dropped every night. The whiskey bottles were from 1940-42, so that's three years of floor sweepings! There has to be a lot more coins in this dump!

I found 6 more coins yesterday, so that brings the total to 55, all from 1910 to 1943. I'll post those finds ASAP.