My brother and I had received permission to detect what was supposed to be an old homesite in western NY. The landowner said he had noticed what appeared to be the remains of a stone foundation on his property and wondered if someone had once lived there. He took us to the site which was located up a series of extremely steep logging roads on a side hill a half an hour from any nearby house or county road. Upon arrival, no evidence of any foundation was visible. The forest had truly reclaimed whatever building that might have once been there. Nevertheless, my brother broke out his trusty minelab xterra 505 while I began sweeping the ground with my CtX 3030.
We began finding old tools; three broadaxes, a hoe, some ice horseshoes, and harmonica reeds which proved that someone actually must have actually lived here. At one point during the afternoon, my brother got a good hit and got down to begin digging it. To our amazement we saw what appeared to be a belt buckle made of brass pop out of the ground. We saw the eagle appear with thirteen stars above it yet had no idea what it was. We concluded that it must be a buckle of some sort, perhaps from the revolutionary war. It looked very old yet in extremely nice shape. We continued searching and about four feet from our first discovery the xterra rang ou once again. We dug down and a second brass buckle was found. Both were about 8 inches deep.
After some research at home we learned that one of the buckles is a sword belt plate, worn by an officer in the army from the early 1800s. The second is thin and fragile, and appears to have been pressed out of a sheet of brass and could be used as a belt buckle also.
We checked with our historical societies and found that no battles from the revolution or civil wars were fought in this area. No prominent soldiers lived here. My brother and I have no idea why these we found in such an unlikely, remote place, far away from any battlefield action.
We've both been detecting for about two years with our Minelabs, and have found them to be an amazing and trusted instrument in finding the unknown and invisible objects in any farm field or front lawn. Guess it proves that you never know what's in the ground!
