I'm not one to post long drawn out stories about all of the great finds I make. But every once in a while, something totally unexpected comes along and blows my mind. Here is one of those such days: Sunday April 5th 2020. My 20 year old recently started working for and moved in with me. He had some time out detecting as a kid but it never really stuck. Lately, he's been asking to go out quite a bit. He's been using one of my old machines to learn on. This particular day I did not really have a plan or any new permissions. I asked him if he wanted to go hit an old home site that I had felt pretty confident that it had been pounded absolutely to death. However, I had not yet gone over it with my Equinox 800. I figured today was as good as any other day to see if I missed anything or if the machine would pick up on something that the others had missed. The Nox managed to squeak out a couple of pistol balls as well as a pewter button that still had the brass shank attached. This is not common to see since pewter doesn't generally hold up well in the ground unless it has a high lead content. Those little wire shanks are usually long gone. This was all good and well. I was absolutely happy with this. The machine was even picking up on just the tiniest pieces of lead and pewter at several inches down. This is really impressive. I kept making my way up and down in one direction, and further over from the usual area that had been producing to see if anything new would pop up in spots that I had not beat to death. I had gotten a faint squeak that was in and out in all directions. However, it was a repeatable signal in the 20's down about 4 to 5 inches. I had the machine in multi frequency, 2 tone, and listening to every target. Now, bear in mind that this site has virtually no modern trash, it is just a grass field, in 1858 the map had no name associated to the house on the land that showed as just a black dot. It is one of those sites where you have to dig every repeatable signal. I will even go after the bigger iron signals just for fun. So, I dug the wonky sounding signal. When I first popped the plug out, the signal seemed to have disappeared. There didn't seem to be anything in the hole or the plug. I started to scan the sides of the plug and boom, there she was. Now she was also a nice crisp clear signal. The reason it was so wonky to begin with was that it was up on edge in the ground. This was giving it almost no detection surface. Fortunately, I was moving slow enough and at the right pace to catch it up on edge like I did. I brushed away some of the dirt to be able to see what my target was. I saw silver shining back at me. It was a smaller coin and I honestly thought it was going to be a half real. No way was it anything of the. It had an eagle staring at me and I knew I had early US silver. I started screaming to my kid who was half way across the field to get over here as quick as possible. I wanted to make sure he saw what I saw. I wanted him to share in the excitement in hopes that it would continue to drive him on the hunt. I slowly pulled the chunk of dirt away with the coin still stuck to it. Then I was able to get the dirt off of the other side to reveal that it was a 1797 draped bust silver dime. There were only 25,261 of these made. This was the NEWEST coin to come from the site and the only silver. All of the rest of the coins had been coppers that included KG2, KG3, Connecticut, and Hibernia's. But nothing newer. This is a very old site that has been good to us. This coin grades at Fine to Very Fine with an appraised value of 3 to 4 thousand dollars. This is the most expensive piece I have ever had the pleasure of digging as well as one of the most satisfying knowing how hard the site had been worked.
Andrew – North America
