WOOF.............

diamondjim · Nov 3, 2007

I got a site in my back pocket...a special site like no other...no coin, no object ever pulled from the ground here can be dated after 1880. No clad, no pull tabs, no chuck e cheese tokens...just seated money, shield nickels, way early injuns and cool OLD foreign coins. I've crushed this amazing little spot time and time again...just a 10' X 100' stretch of land deep in the woods that simply shouldn't exist, but it does. As time and the elements work it over I drop in occasionally to see if there's anything left, usually not.

Today popped a CRUSTY copper coin...too crusty to see any detail, except just a little bit of beading around the edge. I'm pumped when later measurements show it to be the exact size of a half cent...but soap and water ain't bringing up any detail...the crust is just too impentatrable...time to go nuclear. A minute in a chemical bath...and...

WOOF. It's a total dog...

What a let down...

Turns out to be a mailbag tag from the Spring st. RR station. Back is completely BLANK. Front has impressed "11" and "spring"

OK, still kinda cool, still the oldest anything I've found lately.

Gypsy Heart · Nov 3, 2007

Cool site! Hope you pull alot more out and the tag is still cool

SgtSki in MI · Nov 3, 2007

Cool old tag

That's a cool tag, especially since you know where it came from.

HH,
SgtSki

desertfox · Nov 3, 2007

Oh, to have a site to hunt like that. I can only dream...... HH and cool tag!

Desertfox

jeff of pa · Nov 3, 2007

Unless the Half cent turned out to be 18th. Century,
I'd take the token over the half cent any day.

How many Half cents were lost during the late 18th. & early 19th. century ?

How many mailbag tags from the Spring st. RR station, were lost ?
or even produced back then ?

Great Find !
Congrats !

Congrats on the site also. not too often you can travel into the past
to detect these days. most sites produce recent stuff also.

halfdime · Nov 3, 2007

Without betraying your spot, can you tell a little more about it? How did you find it?

TN-Joe · Nov 3, 2007

Nice tag!
HH,
Joe

Mona Lisa · Nov 3, 2007

I'm glad you're still with us, Jimi! That's an interesting find....weird that it has that beading around the edge like a coin would. 8)

diamondjim · Nov 3, 2007

beading front and back...very odd. I thought it might even be an old coin reused after it got too worn out, but it turns out to be punched in brass, not coin copper.

it's getting tough to find sites around here these days, so I'm a little reluctant to provie site details except to say this is in one of the 400 some odd parks in the county, i.e.: not tresspassing to get to this one. what makes this place special is how the material got here...it's a privy dump where they cleaned out the downtown privies and transported the "stuff" here. privies always good for a coin or two...but this one was the collection point for numerous privies and had a far higher concentration of coins. even though I've worked the site over hard, I still go back and metal detect it from time to time. I can't get into the details of how it was preserved, how newer objects were prevented from sneaking in...but the net result is an amazing chunk of ground where everything you dig is going to be old...a real time capsle kinda place.

but the rules of finding stuff here are no different than anywhere else...dig all the junk at your prime sites. I hit a large hunk of iron first, rather than just pass it over I took the time to dig it out...then I got a nice strong coin signal where the iron had been.

as for tag vs. coin...well, I haven't dug any old coins in awhile. while this one is special in that it can be tied to a historic location I'm just jonsin' for an old coin or two.