Old Timey Relics

I met Stevouke from the Wheat State Treasure Hunter group after lunch work to hunt a lot located in an old part of town. We both experienced heavy EMI so it was tough hunting.

For my part, I ended with three cool relics:

This is a 1922 commemorative token from Pella Iowa. I saw that one sold online for $18.  They are supposed to be rare.

The interesting thing about this token is the Latin inscription; ‘In Des Spes Nostra et Refugium’ translates to ‘In God our Hope and refuge’. Every where I looked however, the Latin for that phrase was ‘In Deo Est Spes Nostra et Refugium’. I wonder if they really misspelled the Latin word for God. Please if you know Latin, weigh in.

This tag is from New Method Bood Bindery from Jacksonville Illinois. The company was founded in 1920 and their motto was ‘ These books are bound to stay bound’

The last relic is definitely local. I couldn’t find any information about it online. I have no idea who Sherry Peter Turley was. Most of the Turleys that came up on my search were from Hutchinson, Ks.  Skateland of course, is a skating rink. I don’t know if they are still open in Wichita.

Besides these cool relics, I found a Bell jar lid with the glass insert still intact plus some clad. No old coins.

Thank you for looking.

Never, never, never, NEVER!…

…skip a site because you’ve heard it has been hunted out.

This year, while hunting a postage stamp-sized park from the late 1800’s with some friends, I found a gold bracelet that at 10K –the bracelet was unmarked, will bring around $400 U.S. once melted. The park is notorious for not yielding anything anymore and yet, there it was, under the coil of my XP Deus metal detector.

The reason why a place is likely to never be hunted out is three-fold:

1) People continue to use a site, even empty lots, and thus the site is replenished with new drops.

2) People who have hunted the place may not have been at the top of their game and thus missed lots of stuff.

3) Considering that a typical target takes up about a square inch of space, well, you do the math.

Plus, there is another mystery to consider here. I don’t know why, and I doubt anyone else knows either, there are many targets that will only be detected at a very specific angle. I had read about this phenomenon from day one but I experienced it first hand well into my first year of detecting. I had hit a private yard from two directions perpendicular to each other (90 degrees) and had returned to do a diagonal search. Going over a spot I had gone over twice in the previous hunts, I got a sweet signal on the AT Pro (my machine at the time) and a VDI that said quarter. I couldn’t believe that I had missed this before. So I decided to go around the target and run my coil over it from different directions. To say that I was shocked is an understatement. I only had to deviate about 15 degrees before I lost the signal completely. COMPLETELY! Not a peep. Not a grunt, whisper, moan. Nothing. Unless I hit the target from that very narrow angle. I dug the hole and at about 4 inches or so, if memory serves me right, I pulled a dateless Standing Liberty quarter.

So lets now think about the fact that a typical target will occupy about 1 square inch of space. Even in a small park, or lot, or yard, we will have a sizable number of square inches to contend with. Add that to the fact that the majority of hunters don’t grid as carefully as they should, or if they do, they eventually tire and get careless, and now you’re beginning to see why there are still good targets left everywhere. Now, remember those targets that will only sound off at a very specific angle and my point is made.

Last, I want to mention something Tom Dankowski says (Tom is a legend of this hobby). “80% of all dropped coins ever, are still in the ground”. He says this because there are several factors making these coins undetectable, the main one being masking. Another one is depth. Tom says that these coins will yield only to the very experienced hunters or to metal detectors of the future.

So there. Don’t be discouraged, the stuff is there. Go get it.

***you can tell when I am not hunting or when I am not finding anything because I start waxing philosophical LOL!***

Thank you for looking!