Metal Detector’s Blog

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!

I was recently hunting in a construction site, looking for Civil War relics with my Fisher 1266-X and a shovel. Nobody was with me while I hunted that day, and the top soil had been piled up from the construction that was going on nearby. It was already dark out, but I had a flashlight and was determined to get a hunt in that day. After only about 10 minutes I got a signal, and about 8” down I found my favorite find to date.

It’s a sweet, and I mean sweet, Virginia Staff Officer’s Coat Button. I had to use my flashlight to see exactly what kind of button it was, but it was a friend of mine who identified it; he’s been detecting Civil War relics for over 20 years and knew what it was right away.

I’ve been told I’ll never dig another button in such good condition.

Timothy C., Winchester, Virginia.

I first got into metal detecting after my parents bought me one when I was 10 years old. On and off for the last 30 years I’ve been treasure hunting. I had a Bounty Hunter 505, but now own a trusty Fisher 1236-X2 . My favorite places to treasure hunt are private property and construction sites, and this past October I got a chance to go to a cleared construction site in Smyrna, Georgia that I was hoping would turn up something good.

The ground was hard and the dirt was dry, so I put my Fisher into “all metal mode” with no discrimination. After about 15 minutes of searching, I heard something and it sounded serious. I dug down about 10 inches into the hard ground and saw my first Civil War relic - a U.S. buckle plate! I knew what it was immediately, and you can only imagine how pumped I was. The first person I told was my wife, and while I don’t know the value of it and haven’t found another Civil War relic at the site since, I will always consider it my favorite find to date.

- Randall S.

Somewhere in Tennessee police searched a muddy city parking lot where workmen discovered a (container-pot) of gold coins that may have been buried during the Civil War. The U.S. gold pieces are worth (conservatively) up to $3,000 each but it’s unclear how many were found since the workmen made off with most of them. “We have accounted for 177 and that’s just by talking to people who said that they had possessed some,” said the Mayor. “There may be a good bit more than that.”

Many of the coins already have been sold to gold dealers. The coins were unearthed by city workmen resurfacing a downtown parking lot and other people apparently have visited the site since then. Word of the discovery spread through the town of 42,000 residents and the Mayor ordered city employees to seal off the area.

A policeman with a metal detector began the city’s official search of the parking lot, which was cordoned off with yellow tape saying “Crime Area. Keep Out.”

“I’ve asked the court to determine who the owner of the coins would be,” the Mayor said. “You can get as many different opinions as there are lawyers. Every lawyer has a different version. “One guy says if it’s money, it belongs to the finder. Maybe that is true. I don’t know,” he said.

“One guy says if it’s a treasure trove, it belongs to the property owner. What is a treasure trove? I don’t know. One guy says that the finder in this case is the city because they were in the employ of the city at the time they found it,” he said.

If the money belongs to the city, the Mayor said he will take legal steps to recover it, although he noted such as undertaking would be complicated. The coins were $2 1/2, $5, $10 and $20 gold pieces. “The face value is not very important” said the Mayor. “The value of the coins is much more than the face value. “The latest mint date was something like 1857, something like that. I may be off a year or two. Some of them were back to the 1840’s and the 1830’s.”

Union soldiers occupied Jackson, Tennessee during the Civil War. “Probably somebody buried that money in 1861 or 1862 when the troops came in to keep them from getting it” he said, “and then died before they recovered it.