Tim Pearson, a metal detectorist and amateur treasure hunter (aren’t we all?) found what he thought was a milk bottle cap back in 2005.
Pearson was detecting in a South Yorkshire field that he had combed over for more than six years. In the past the field that had yielded nothing more than a Roman coin for him, but this time, there was something special waiting.
I saw a guy detecting when I was a child and went to see what he was doing. I watched him for about 5 minutes, and he pulled a Mercury dime out of the ground. It was the first time I had ever seen a metal detector or a mercury dime and even though I couldn’t get a metal detector until I was older, I haven’t put it down since!
My Minelab Advantage metal detector helped me find one of the most rare Texas Civil War buttons ever made.
I got into metal detecting because my wife bought me one for my birthday. 11 years later and I’m still addicted to this great hobby. My favorite places to hunt are private property and plowed fields. The day that I found this button I was searching a plowed field in the state of Louisiana. I had my Minelab Advantage, which I had been using for over two years by this point, and a shovel to help dig.
On October 22, 2006 I was relic hunting near Fredericksburg, Virginia. I had just dug three Confederate Gardner bullets and received another signal on my Explorer XS that sounded and IDed like another bullet.
After dumpung my second shovelful of dirt I was surprised to see a small silver coin on top of the dirt pile. I thought I had just dug a piece of Spanish silver but when I picked up the coin I knew I was wrong.
My occupation is in Sales, but while a contractor was developing the property where I was previously employed I saw people metal detecting. After asking them what they were finding and hearing about the Civil War relics they were finding I got hooked!
That was about 8 years ago, and I’ve been metal detecting beaches or anywhere I can find Civil War relics ever since!
Last summer a friend and I were detecting a site when I found this 1773 Spanish reale in shockingly good shape. It was about 4 inches down. This was at a site along the El Camino Reale trail in central CA. We knew that there was a small and short lived trading post on the spot in the mid 1800’s and there were a lot of corresponding seated coins found. However, we also knew that it was in the area of one of D’Anza’a camps as he mapped the inland trail of California in the spring of 1776.
