Active duty military life can be hard with frequent moves to new duty stations around the world. In 2005, I lucked out and received orders to Virginia. It was then that I was introduced to the hobby of metal detecting. The 100 miles between Richmond and Washington DC was the most highly contested soil during the Civil War as each army spent four years positioning for offensive and defensive actions. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers occupied this countryside, leaving behind many artifacts of their lives as soldiers. The battle areas are preserved on National or State Parks, and metal detecting is prohibited on those sites. The land surrounding the parks is private property, and this is exactly where these massive armies camped during the course of the war.
In August 2011, the producers of Minelab’s exclusive video series “The Civil War Uncovered” received an invitation to metal detect on private property in Culpeper County (Virginia) where portions of the 1st US Calvary were camped during the Civil War. This was an amazing opportunity to find 150 year old Civil War relics. The property owner agreed to let us hunt for just one hour. Bob Painter (Relic Bob) and I met on the property about an hour before sunset. Bob has almost 4 decades of relic hunting experience and uses a Minelab GPX 4800. I was no match for Bob’s decades of experience, so I armed myself with a GPX 5000 to reduce the handicap.
Bob zipped around the pasture, studied the terrain and slopes, and picked out a spot he thought would have been a perfect camping area for a Calvary unit. Within minutes, he had his Minelab fired up, and I could hear it singing the beloved tunes of solid targets. I tried an area about 150 feet from him, further up on a knoll. I scratched up a few period square nails and a blob of melted lead that was buried in 10 inches of soil. Civil War relic hunters love to find the old square nails, and soldiers sitting around a campfire would spend time melting or carving their bullets, shaping them into other objects such as animals or chess pieces.
After about 30 minutes, I decided to head down the hill to where Bob was hunting. Experience always wins… When I got there, he had already recovered some bullets, a watch key, and a few coat buttons. He put me on a spot where he was getting multiple signals with his GPX 4800, and I began to slowly sweep the area with the GPX 5000. After a few minutes, the detector let out a beautiful and deep “oooo-wee-oooo” tune. Go ahead, sing it, you know you want to (or already have).
I opened up a hole and ran into some amber-colored glass about 8 inches down from the surface. It was thick, sharp as a razor, and definitely Civil War period. The detector continued to sing, and I continued my vertical plunge into that horse pasture. I was down about 12 inches or so when a rusted iron object came into view. It was free in the soil and was removed into the sunlight for the first time in 150 years. It looked like a piece of a gunsmith tool to me. Another sweep of the hole indicated that a massive target was still in the hole. It was deep, and sounded big. The sun was setting and the clock was ticking. Just 5 minutes left to hunt. Could we ask for more time? What was making that GPX 5000 scream? How deep could it be?
Find out by watching Minelab’s “The Civil War Uncovered” Episode 1: The Lucky Horseshoe Calvary Camp below:
David Shackleton
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