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DOTD draft 2008-01-27
lordmarcovan
Posts: 43,198 ✭✭✭✭✭
DIGS O' THE DAY™ (2008-01-27): THE "PAY FOR PLAY" SCHEME, HAGEY HOUSE, AND FIRST SILVER OF 2008
On Sunday, January 27, 2008, I went out to lunch with my wife and daughter. After eating, I was feeling a bit sluggish and thought I’d spend the afternoon in bed, alternately napping and working on projects with my laptop computer. I was still a bit tired from a road trip and coin show the day before. However, as we drove home, my wife and I discussed what a beautiful day it had turned out to be, and how she planned to work in the yard or in her flowerbeds. This made me think of how nice it would be to be working in someone else’s yard… with a metal detector!
“You should go digging today,” my wife suggested. “If you don’t, you’ll regret not taking advantage of such gorgeous weather.”
She was right, as usual. It was indeed gorgeous weather- the sort of warmer January day that is tailor-made for outdoor activity here in Georgia’s Golden Isles. It was sunny with totally cloudless blue skies, and the temperature was in the mid- to upper-sixties, making it much warmer than some of the previous days that week. I put on my digging clothes.
So it was to be a “dig day”, then. But where would I go? I could always go to the squares and parks of Old Town Brunswick, as usual, and might coax some long-hidden coin or relic from the soil, but I’d been hunting the squares for decades, and while they were still producing, the returns there have diminished considerably over the years. I wanted more excitement than the usual overhunted public park could provide. I wanted a shot at finding multiple silver coins in a single outing. I wanted a fresh, virgin site.
In short, I wanted to detect in an older private yard that had not been visited by detectorists- these yards around the older homes in the historic district are as good as it gets, for urban coinshooting sites in my area.
I am usually far too timid to knock on a stranger’s door and ask permission to detect in their yard. It’s awkward, to say the least. So on my previous outing, I decided I would start offering to PAY to detect in people’s yards. A modest fee per visit would be worth it to me, even if I struck out. I dubbed this “The Pay-For-Play Scheme.” This way I wouldn’t feel like I was imposing on the kindness of property owners, and asking for free hospitality right out of nowhere.
I mentally pictured myself as the owner of a home in Old Town, with a stranger at the door who wanted to dig holes in my yard. What’s in it for me, besides the hassle, and a hole or two in my lawn? What would this crazy detectorist have to offer me to make me say yes?
From my standpoint as that crazed, wannabe detectorist, what could I offer someone to catch their interest and get my foot in the door, metaphorically speaking? Offering four or five dollars per hour could get expensive, particularly with no guarantee of results, besides, I was functionally cash-broke at the moment, anyway.
Then an idea struck me- why not offer the property owner an old silver coin or two up front (non-dug, of course), in order to be granted permission to hunt for MORE old silver coins? It had a nice symmetry to it. But I would have to offer a coin that even a non-collector would take interest in. A silver dollar would fit the bill nicely.
As I’m a part-time coin dealer, I usually have older coins lying around. I never sell the ones I dig up while detecting, but I buy and sell many others. For today’s projected “yard rental fee”, I selected an 1879-O Morgan dollar. It was a lower-grade piece worth only about fifteen dollars or so (for which I’d fortuitously paid ten bucks-less than its melt value). But it was a big, old, silver coin from the 1800s. Who could refuse such a thing, in return for something so trivial as letting a detectorist hunt in the yard for the day? If it would buy me three or four hours in a large, unhunted yard around an older home, it would be worth it to me.
Maybe I’d even find ANOTHER silver dollar- who knows? It hasn’t happened for me yet, but it’s within the realm of possibility in this part of town. I’d settle for ANY old silver coins. Even if my finds turned out to be worth less than the silver dollar I’d given up as a “rental fee”, I’d still have the thrill of the hunt and some pictures and a story out of the deal.
“Be sure to carry your cell phone,” my wife reminded me as she often does when I am leaving for a digging adventure. I told her I’d misplaced it, but it was almost certainly in my van somewhere. I found it under the driver’s seat. I’m not a big cellphone user, but it does come in handy sometimes. Today was to be one such time, as it happens. (Not to mention the time when I got my van stuck in the mud on a rural relic site miles from nowhere- had I not had the cell phone with me then, I'd have had to spend the night out there.)
Two houses in Old Town immediately came to mind as prime candidates for “The Pay For Play Scheme”, with yards for which I’d willingly give up an old silver dollar to have three or four hours’ detecting in. The first was a large brick structure situated on an oversized lot at the southeast corner of Union and Prince Streets in Old Town Brunswick. Three stories tall, it is a truly grand edifice one could easily refer to as a “mansion” without much exaggeration. Past hunts along the public sidewalk strip adjacent to it had produced worthy coins and relics, and the neighboring yard had been very productive when I’d briefly had permission to hunt there in the 1990s. Since past goodies had come up from all around it, I knew that searching for silver in this particular corner lot should be like the proverbial “shooting fish in a barrel”. Beyond a doubt, there were silver coins in this yard, and all I had to do was get permission to go dig them up.
Likely built between 1910 and 1920, the house was slightly “newer” than many of the grand Victorian homes in the neighborhood, but its larger yard and corner location more than compensated for this, and there was still a pretty good chance of 19th century coins there, regardless of when the house had been built.
I knocked at the back door, since it appeared to be the entrance more often used than the front. Immediately a dog barked, and a lady came to the door. She looked mildly apprehensive at first, but who doesn’t, when a stranger is knocking at the back door? I introduced myself and layed out my spiel, showing the silver dollar and one of my “wooden dollar” business cards. Gradually, she warmed up, and agreed to let me detect until sundown in return for the silver dollar. Her name was Mrs. Hagey, and we talked briefly about the history of the house.
Permission granted! Yes! I WAS IN! Now I had sole permission to detect in a big yard I’d had my eye on for years! These moments are always exhilirating.
I went to the van and got out my camera to take some preliminary shots of the house for this story. The camera disc froze up, rendering the pictures useless. I was able to quickly fix the problem by popping out the battery and rebooting the camera, however.
As it happens, the house is in a picture I’d shot almost a year before, when I was hunting the sidewalk strip in front of it and found a silver paratrooper’s badge from the Second World War. The badge had a star on it, indicating its owner had made a jump in combat, probably during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. I’ll let some of the previous year’s photos set the scene. If I was making finds like this on the public sidewalk, imagine what I might find with exclusive access to the adjacent private yard!
Ready to begin the day’s adventure in my newly “rented” yard, I put away the stubborn camera and opened the back doors of my van to retrieve my detector and digging gear.
With an almost-audible “whoosh”, all of the wind left my sails immediately.
There WAS no detector in the back of my van!
I’d left it at home, in one of our other vehicles!
Now I’d just paid to “rent” this terrific yard for a few short hours, the remaining hours of daylight were ticking away, and my detector was nearly thirty miles from me, as we live out in the rural western portion of the county.
After briefly cursing myself for a fool, I remembered the cell phone, and called my wife at home, imploring her to get my gear from the other car and bring it part of the way out to me. I wouldn’t ask her to bring it all the way into town, but would meet her halfway. She agreed, and I met her at the agreed location. Now I had my detector back, but I’d lost thirty or forty minutes of my precious detecting time. My wife laughed at me, but I deserved it. I wish I could say this was the first time I’d driven thirty-some miles to go detecting and left the detector at home, but it isn’t- I’d done the same thing in North Carolina years before. That was during my previous marriage, and I didn’t have a cell phone then. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have bothered to call my ex-wife to bring my detector to me, because it wouldn’t have happened.
Here’s a tip for you sportsmen out there, whatever your sport may be- if you’re going to “pay to play”, you’d better make sure you’ve brought your equipment to the game, first!
Finally, back at the Hagey house with detector in hand, I began my quest for lost silver.
The first finds were unsurprising- they turned out to be modern Memorial cents, some of them buried rather deep for coins only thirty years old. Then a copper nail came up, which is not a good sign. If there are lots of copper nails around, it can be a headache for a detectorist, because unlike iron nails one can “tune out”, the copper ones read solidly in the coin range.
Rounding the corner of the house, I met Mr. Hagey. We shook hands and he told me he was interested in seeing what I might find, then he set up a ladder and began pruning one of the trees near the sidewalk. It was a nice day for yard work, but even nicer for “yard play”, in my case.
Around the base of a truly impressive, regal looking palm tree at the front of the house, I saw what appeared to be boiled peanuts lying on the ground. Boiled peanuts are a Georgia delicacy I’ve never quite understood- while I like roasted peanuts just fine, I can’t quite bring myself to find the boiled ones in their shells appealing, probably because of the way they look. Mr. Hagey said that boiled peanuts are great; you just have to put the right amount of salt in the water when you boil them.
But these were not boiled peanuts scattered beneath the tree- they were dates. Apparently the big tree was a date palm. I wonder if the dates are edible. I wasn’t about to try them, but I’ll bet the birds like them. There must be other date palms in Brunswick, but I can’t remember seeing any- most of the other palms and palmetto trees we have are not nearly so grand as this one.
Soon I had a deeper signal on the detector, and had to dig nearly ten inches to retrieve a coin. In this soil, a small cent dug from ten inches will normally be an Indian Head, but this was a Wheat cent- a 1948-D. The first old coin of the day had arrived. It was awfully deep for a sixty year old coin, but Mr. Hagey mentioned that there had been some earth moved around in the yard at various times.
A loud signal turned out to be a large and heavy lead sinker weighing two ounces or so. It was as big as a bird egg, and obviously it was a net sinker of some kind. The hole through it was larger at one end than on the other. This is not a surprising find in a city where shrimping is one of the major industries.
At one end of the yard, near where an ornamental fish pond was situated, I noticed a strange ring of tiny brown mushrooms in the grass. They formed a visible circle. I believe such circles of mushrooms were once called “fairy circles” in folklore, though I can’t remember what significance the fairy circles had. Certainly it wasn’t treasure in this case, as I didn’t get any detector signals inside the circle. Maybe the local fairies in Georgia are poorer than their leprechaun kin from the Old World.
(Update- after doing some research online, I have found that "fairy circles" or "fairy rings" were said in folklore to be "doors into the fairies' world, transporting people to other places or making people appear in the same place in a different time". Transporting people to the same place in a different time, eh? My, how interesting, in light of what every detectorist tries to do! Perhaps if I'd stepped inside the fairy circle instead of sweeping my searchcoil there, I would have gone back in time and seen exactly where all the coins were dropped in the yard!)
I got a middle-range signal on the detector which could have been anything, really- I had to dig it to see what it was.
The glint of silver in the grey dirt soon told me I had my first silver coin of 2008. It was a War nickel, and a pretty decent one for a dug example!
Due to wartime shortages, the government changed the composition of the five-cent piece from 1942 to 1945. Unlike “regular” nickels, the War nickels count as silver coins. Unlike the 90% silver composition of most classic US coins, these are only 35% fine, but that counts as silver, nonetheless! War nickels have a large mintmark over the dome of Monticello on the reverse, and this one had the “P” for Philadelphia. It was a 1944-P.
Well, with one silver coin dug in less than an hour, perhaps I would find more this afternoon!
One of the subsequent signals nearby was large and loud, and I dug, with visions of silver dollars or Walking Liberty halves in my mind. The target turned out to be silver, but not quite in the way I’d imagined- it was the handle from a vintage mirror or hairbrush, such as was often seen on a lady’s dresser in bygone years. It had lilies or some similar flower as a design motif. The metal was rather thin, and it was probably only silver plated, but it was old, and rather interesting. It might have dated to the 1920s or so. There is no telling how the handle ended up broken off and buried in the yard.
I added some more modern cents and a modern clad dime to my pockets. The copper-nickel “clad” dimes, unlike their earlier silver counterparts, will usually come out of the ground a dull brown color, whereas silver is often nice and bright even after being buried for generations. This contrast was soon to manifest itself- after the clad dime came up, I found my first silver dime of the day!
I chased a coinlike signal to a depth of four or five inches and didn’t see the target, but when I rechecked the dirt I had brought out of the hole, I got a signal, and there by the edge of the hole I saw the unmistakable gleam of silver yet again!
It was a Winged Liberty, or “Mercury” dime, dated 1917! I’ve found dozens of Mercury dimes over the years, including several of this particular date, but I’ll never get tired of them. They are beautiful coins, and a joy to dig.
The northern side of the yard that faced Prince Street had now produced two silver coins. I followed this success up with another Wheat cent, which oddly enough turned out to be a 1948-D, just like the other one I’d found. Then I chased some junk targets, one of which turned out to be a surprisingly lightweight “rock” of coal-like slag material. I occassionally find such “hot rocks” in this part of town. I’m not sure if they’re waste from old furnaces or what, but oddly enough, they do register a metallic signal on a detector.
Back in the front yard on the Union Street side, not far from the “fairy circle” of mushrooms, I dug another large net sinker and some more copper nails, as well as an intriguing signal that turned out to be a lead toy soldier. I love digging antique toy soldiers, but seldom find them with all of their appendages intact. This one was fully intact and carried a shield. I thought he was a medieval knight at first, but the fringes on his pants proved he was an Indian brave in buckskin breeches, wielding a war club. He still had traces of yellow paint at the base, and excess untrimmed “sprue” from the casting showed around his upraised foot. No doubt he came from some “Cowboys and Indians” playset of the 1930s or 1940s. Though it’s but a modest relic, I count this little Indian as a good find, worthy of a smile.
Back on the Prince Street side again, I got a clear coin signal that registered as a dime at six inches. No matter which direction I swung the coil over it, the detector’s meter reading remained the same, with no bouncing around. This, then, was an excellent signal, the kind that makes me salivate in anticipation. It was a solid “locked on”signal with a bit of depth to it. Surely a dime at six inches would be a silver dime.
When I finally saw the coin at the bottom of the hole, I could see it had a whitish-grey color, so I knew I had done it again! It was another silver dime! At first I thought it was a silver Roosevelt, but it turned out to be a second Mercury dime, which I like even better. Squinting at this one in the sunlight, I thought it said 1940, but when I got it home and cleaned it, it proved to be a 1944, just like the War nickel.
I had found three pieces of silver in a single outing. This is not sensational by some other detectorists’ standards, but I think anyone would call it a success. For me, it was an above-average outing. Even though I didn’t find any pre-1900 coins (and it has in fact been a while since I have), I was very pleased with the results, and I could say the first silver of 2008 was in the bag!
The day’s coin haul was seven modern pieces totaling sixteen cents face value: six Memorial cents and a clad dime. Additionally, the older coin tally was five pieces totalling twenty-seven cents face value: two 1948-D Wheat cents, a 1944-P War nickel, and 1917 and 1944 Mercury dimes. The ratio of old coins to new was very good and the face value of the older coins actually exceeded the face value of the modern ones.
In terms of numismatic value and/or silver bullion value, my old coin finds did not quite match the value of the silver dollar I had given up as a “rental fee” for the afternoon’s fun, but I don’t mind that one little bit. Monetarily, it was barely a break-even proposition for me, but I don't care about that- in terms of fun, I definitely got my silver dollar's worth! It was a win-win situation, with both the homeowner and I profiting. Mrs. Hagey got a silver dollar and I gave her the silver mirror handle and the Wheat cents, while I kept the little lead Indian and the silver coins will go into my “keeper” album. Besides, I got material for another dig story, as you see. I strongly suspect this tale is a bit more interesting than it would have been had I gone out to the parks again.
Now that “The Pay For Play” scheme has proven viable, I’ll have to try using it to get into some of those other yards I’ve eyed for a long time.
When that happens, I’ll be sure to bring you along on the hunt. Who knows what treasures await?
-RWS
Previously on DIGS O' THE DAY™ (2008-01-17): EAST BEACH, OLD COAST GUARD STATION, SATILLA SQUARE
On Sunday, January 27, 2008, I went out to lunch with my wife and daughter. After eating, I was feeling a bit sluggish and thought I’d spend the afternoon in bed, alternately napping and working on projects with my laptop computer. I was still a bit tired from a road trip and coin show the day before. However, as we drove home, my wife and I discussed what a beautiful day it had turned out to be, and how she planned to work in the yard or in her flowerbeds. This made me think of how nice it would be to be working in someone else’s yard… with a metal detector!
“You should go digging today,” my wife suggested. “If you don’t, you’ll regret not taking advantage of such gorgeous weather.”
She was right, as usual. It was indeed gorgeous weather- the sort of warmer January day that is tailor-made for outdoor activity here in Georgia’s Golden Isles. It was sunny with totally cloudless blue skies, and the temperature was in the mid- to upper-sixties, making it much warmer than some of the previous days that week. I put on my digging clothes.
So it was to be a “dig day”, then. But where would I go? I could always go to the squares and parks of Old Town Brunswick, as usual, and might coax some long-hidden coin or relic from the soil, but I’d been hunting the squares for decades, and while they were still producing, the returns there have diminished considerably over the years. I wanted more excitement than the usual overhunted public park could provide. I wanted a shot at finding multiple silver coins in a single outing. I wanted a fresh, virgin site.
In short, I wanted to detect in an older private yard that had not been visited by detectorists- these yards around the older homes in the historic district are as good as it gets, for urban coinshooting sites in my area.
I am usually far too timid to knock on a stranger’s door and ask permission to detect in their yard. It’s awkward, to say the least. So on my previous outing, I decided I would start offering to PAY to detect in people’s yards. A modest fee per visit would be worth it to me, even if I struck out. I dubbed this “The Pay-For-Play Scheme.” This way I wouldn’t feel like I was imposing on the kindness of property owners, and asking for free hospitality right out of nowhere.
I mentally pictured myself as the owner of a home in Old Town, with a stranger at the door who wanted to dig holes in my yard. What’s in it for me, besides the hassle, and a hole or two in my lawn? What would this crazy detectorist have to offer me to make me say yes?
From my standpoint as that crazed, wannabe detectorist, what could I offer someone to catch their interest and get my foot in the door, metaphorically speaking? Offering four or five dollars per hour could get expensive, particularly with no guarantee of results, besides, I was functionally cash-broke at the moment, anyway.
Then an idea struck me- why not offer the property owner an old silver coin or two up front (non-dug, of course), in order to be granted permission to hunt for MORE old silver coins? It had a nice symmetry to it. But I would have to offer a coin that even a non-collector would take interest in. A silver dollar would fit the bill nicely.
As I’m a part-time coin dealer, I usually have older coins lying around. I never sell the ones I dig up while detecting, but I buy and sell many others. For today’s projected “yard rental fee”, I selected an 1879-O Morgan dollar. It was a lower-grade piece worth only about fifteen dollars or so (for which I’d fortuitously paid ten bucks-less than its melt value). But it was a big, old, silver coin from the 1800s. Who could refuse such a thing, in return for something so trivial as letting a detectorist hunt in the yard for the day? If it would buy me three or four hours in a large, unhunted yard around an older home, it would be worth it to me.
Maybe I’d even find ANOTHER silver dollar- who knows? It hasn’t happened for me yet, but it’s within the realm of possibility in this part of town. I’d settle for ANY old silver coins. Even if my finds turned out to be worth less than the silver dollar I’d given up as a “rental fee”, I’d still have the thrill of the hunt and some pictures and a story out of the deal.
“Be sure to carry your cell phone,” my wife reminded me as she often does when I am leaving for a digging adventure. I told her I’d misplaced it, but it was almost certainly in my van somewhere. I found it under the driver’s seat. I’m not a big cellphone user, but it does come in handy sometimes. Today was to be one such time, as it happens. (Not to mention the time when I got my van stuck in the mud on a rural relic site miles from nowhere- had I not had the cell phone with me then, I'd have had to spend the night out there.)
Two houses in Old Town immediately came to mind as prime candidates for “The Pay For Play Scheme”, with yards for which I’d willingly give up an old silver dollar to have three or four hours’ detecting in. The first was a large brick structure situated on an oversized lot at the southeast corner of Union and Prince Streets in Old Town Brunswick. Three stories tall, it is a truly grand edifice one could easily refer to as a “mansion” without much exaggeration. Past hunts along the public sidewalk strip adjacent to it had produced worthy coins and relics, and the neighboring yard had been very productive when I’d briefly had permission to hunt there in the 1990s. Since past goodies had come up from all around it, I knew that searching for silver in this particular corner lot should be like the proverbial “shooting fish in a barrel”. Beyond a doubt, there were silver coins in this yard, and all I had to do was get permission to go dig them up.
Likely built between 1910 and 1920, the house was slightly “newer” than many of the grand Victorian homes in the neighborhood, but its larger yard and corner location more than compensated for this, and there was still a pretty good chance of 19th century coins there, regardless of when the house had been built.
I knocked at the back door, since it appeared to be the entrance more often used than the front. Immediately a dog barked, and a lady came to the door. She looked mildly apprehensive at first, but who doesn’t, when a stranger is knocking at the back door? I introduced myself and layed out my spiel, showing the silver dollar and one of my “wooden dollar” business cards. Gradually, she warmed up, and agreed to let me detect until sundown in return for the silver dollar. Her name was Mrs. Hagey, and we talked briefly about the history of the house.
Permission granted! Yes! I WAS IN! Now I had sole permission to detect in a big yard I’d had my eye on for years! These moments are always exhilirating.
I went to the van and got out my camera to take some preliminary shots of the house for this story. The camera disc froze up, rendering the pictures useless. I was able to quickly fix the problem by popping out the battery and rebooting the camera, however.
As it happens, the house is in a picture I’d shot almost a year before, when I was hunting the sidewalk strip in front of it and found a silver paratrooper’s badge from the Second World War. The badge had a star on it, indicating its owner had made a jump in combat, probably during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. I’ll let some of the previous year’s photos set the scene. If I was making finds like this on the public sidewalk, imagine what I might find with exclusive access to the adjacent private yard!
Ready to begin the day’s adventure in my newly “rented” yard, I put away the stubborn camera and opened the back doors of my van to retrieve my detector and digging gear.
With an almost-audible “whoosh”, all of the wind left my sails immediately.
There WAS no detector in the back of my van!
I’d left it at home, in one of our other vehicles!
Now I’d just paid to “rent” this terrific yard for a few short hours, the remaining hours of daylight were ticking away, and my detector was nearly thirty miles from me, as we live out in the rural western portion of the county.
After briefly cursing myself for a fool, I remembered the cell phone, and called my wife at home, imploring her to get my gear from the other car and bring it part of the way out to me. I wouldn’t ask her to bring it all the way into town, but would meet her halfway. She agreed, and I met her at the agreed location. Now I had my detector back, but I’d lost thirty or forty minutes of my precious detecting time. My wife laughed at me, but I deserved it. I wish I could say this was the first time I’d driven thirty-some miles to go detecting and left the detector at home, but it isn’t- I’d done the same thing in North Carolina years before. That was during my previous marriage, and I didn’t have a cell phone then. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have bothered to call my ex-wife to bring my detector to me, because it wouldn’t have happened.
Here’s a tip for you sportsmen out there, whatever your sport may be- if you’re going to “pay to play”, you’d better make sure you’ve brought your equipment to the game, first!
Finally, back at the Hagey house with detector in hand, I began my quest for lost silver.
The first finds were unsurprising- they turned out to be modern Memorial cents, some of them buried rather deep for coins only thirty years old. Then a copper nail came up, which is not a good sign. If there are lots of copper nails around, it can be a headache for a detectorist, because unlike iron nails one can “tune out”, the copper ones read solidly in the coin range.
Rounding the corner of the house, I met Mr. Hagey. We shook hands and he told me he was interested in seeing what I might find, then he set up a ladder and began pruning one of the trees near the sidewalk. It was a nice day for yard work, but even nicer for “yard play”, in my case.
Around the base of a truly impressive, regal looking palm tree at the front of the house, I saw what appeared to be boiled peanuts lying on the ground. Boiled peanuts are a Georgia delicacy I’ve never quite understood- while I like roasted peanuts just fine, I can’t quite bring myself to find the boiled ones in their shells appealing, probably because of the way they look. Mr. Hagey said that boiled peanuts are great; you just have to put the right amount of salt in the water when you boil them.
But these were not boiled peanuts scattered beneath the tree- they were dates. Apparently the big tree was a date palm. I wonder if the dates are edible. I wasn’t about to try them, but I’ll bet the birds like them. There must be other date palms in Brunswick, but I can’t remember seeing any- most of the other palms and palmetto trees we have are not nearly so grand as this one.
Soon I had a deeper signal on the detector, and had to dig nearly ten inches to retrieve a coin. In this soil, a small cent dug from ten inches will normally be an Indian Head, but this was a Wheat cent- a 1948-D. The first old coin of the day had arrived. It was awfully deep for a sixty year old coin, but Mr. Hagey mentioned that there had been some earth moved around in the yard at various times.
A loud signal turned out to be a large and heavy lead sinker weighing two ounces or so. It was as big as a bird egg, and obviously it was a net sinker of some kind. The hole through it was larger at one end than on the other. This is not a surprising find in a city where shrimping is one of the major industries.
At one end of the yard, near where an ornamental fish pond was situated, I noticed a strange ring of tiny brown mushrooms in the grass. They formed a visible circle. I believe such circles of mushrooms were once called “fairy circles” in folklore, though I can’t remember what significance the fairy circles had. Certainly it wasn’t treasure in this case, as I didn’t get any detector signals inside the circle. Maybe the local fairies in Georgia are poorer than their leprechaun kin from the Old World.
(Update- after doing some research online, I have found that "fairy circles" or "fairy rings" were said in folklore to be "doors into the fairies' world, transporting people to other places or making people appear in the same place in a different time". Transporting people to the same place in a different time, eh? My, how interesting, in light of what every detectorist tries to do! Perhaps if I'd stepped inside the fairy circle instead of sweeping my searchcoil there, I would have gone back in time and seen exactly where all the coins were dropped in the yard!)
I got a middle-range signal on the detector which could have been anything, really- I had to dig it to see what it was.
The glint of silver in the grey dirt soon told me I had my first silver coin of 2008. It was a War nickel, and a pretty decent one for a dug example!
Due to wartime shortages, the government changed the composition of the five-cent piece from 1942 to 1945. Unlike “regular” nickels, the War nickels count as silver coins. Unlike the 90% silver composition of most classic US coins, these are only 35% fine, but that counts as silver, nonetheless! War nickels have a large mintmark over the dome of Monticello on the reverse, and this one had the “P” for Philadelphia. It was a 1944-P.
Well, with one silver coin dug in less than an hour, perhaps I would find more this afternoon!
One of the subsequent signals nearby was large and loud, and I dug, with visions of silver dollars or Walking Liberty halves in my mind. The target turned out to be silver, but not quite in the way I’d imagined- it was the handle from a vintage mirror or hairbrush, such as was often seen on a lady’s dresser in bygone years. It had lilies or some similar flower as a design motif. The metal was rather thin, and it was probably only silver plated, but it was old, and rather interesting. It might have dated to the 1920s or so. There is no telling how the handle ended up broken off and buried in the yard.
I added some more modern cents and a modern clad dime to my pockets. The copper-nickel “clad” dimes, unlike their earlier silver counterparts, will usually come out of the ground a dull brown color, whereas silver is often nice and bright even after being buried for generations. This contrast was soon to manifest itself- after the clad dime came up, I found my first silver dime of the day!
I chased a coinlike signal to a depth of four or five inches and didn’t see the target, but when I rechecked the dirt I had brought out of the hole, I got a signal, and there by the edge of the hole I saw the unmistakable gleam of silver yet again!
It was a Winged Liberty, or “Mercury” dime, dated 1917! I’ve found dozens of Mercury dimes over the years, including several of this particular date, but I’ll never get tired of them. They are beautiful coins, and a joy to dig.
The northern side of the yard that faced Prince Street had now produced two silver coins. I followed this success up with another Wheat cent, which oddly enough turned out to be a 1948-D, just like the other one I’d found. Then I chased some junk targets, one of which turned out to be a surprisingly lightweight “rock” of coal-like slag material. I occassionally find such “hot rocks” in this part of town. I’m not sure if they’re waste from old furnaces or what, but oddly enough, they do register a metallic signal on a detector.
Back in the front yard on the Union Street side, not far from the “fairy circle” of mushrooms, I dug another large net sinker and some more copper nails, as well as an intriguing signal that turned out to be a lead toy soldier. I love digging antique toy soldiers, but seldom find them with all of their appendages intact. This one was fully intact and carried a shield. I thought he was a medieval knight at first, but the fringes on his pants proved he was an Indian brave in buckskin breeches, wielding a war club. He still had traces of yellow paint at the base, and excess untrimmed “sprue” from the casting showed around his upraised foot. No doubt he came from some “Cowboys and Indians” playset of the 1930s or 1940s. Though it’s but a modest relic, I count this little Indian as a good find, worthy of a smile.
Back on the Prince Street side again, I got a clear coin signal that registered as a dime at six inches. No matter which direction I swung the coil over it, the detector’s meter reading remained the same, with no bouncing around. This, then, was an excellent signal, the kind that makes me salivate in anticipation. It was a solid “locked on”signal with a bit of depth to it. Surely a dime at six inches would be a silver dime.
When I finally saw the coin at the bottom of the hole, I could see it had a whitish-grey color, so I knew I had done it again! It was another silver dime! At first I thought it was a silver Roosevelt, but it turned out to be a second Mercury dime, which I like even better. Squinting at this one in the sunlight, I thought it said 1940, but when I got it home and cleaned it, it proved to be a 1944, just like the War nickel.
I had found three pieces of silver in a single outing. This is not sensational by some other detectorists’ standards, but I think anyone would call it a success. For me, it was an above-average outing. Even though I didn’t find any pre-1900 coins (and it has in fact been a while since I have), I was very pleased with the results, and I could say the first silver of 2008 was in the bag!
The day’s coin haul was seven modern pieces totaling sixteen cents face value: six Memorial cents and a clad dime. Additionally, the older coin tally was five pieces totalling twenty-seven cents face value: two 1948-D Wheat cents, a 1944-P War nickel, and 1917 and 1944 Mercury dimes. The ratio of old coins to new was very good and the face value of the older coins actually exceeded the face value of the modern ones.
In terms of numismatic value and/or silver bullion value, my old coin finds did not quite match the value of the silver dollar I had given up as a “rental fee” for the afternoon’s fun, but I don’t mind that one little bit. Monetarily, it was barely a break-even proposition for me, but I don't care about that- in terms of fun, I definitely got my silver dollar's worth! It was a win-win situation, with both the homeowner and I profiting. Mrs. Hagey got a silver dollar and I gave her the silver mirror handle and the Wheat cents, while I kept the little lead Indian and the silver coins will go into my “keeper” album. Besides, I got material for another dig story, as you see. I strongly suspect this tale is a bit more interesting than it would have been had I gone out to the parks again.
Now that “The Pay For Play” scheme has proven viable, I’ll have to try using it to get into some of those other yards I’ve eyed for a long time.
When that happens, I’ll be sure to bring you along on the hunt. Who knows what treasures await?
-RWS
Previously on DIGS O' THE DAY™ (2008-01-17): EAST BEACH, OLD COAST GUARD STATION, SATILLA SQUARE
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