Treasure Hunting

It’s truly the gift that keeps on giving.

A week after receiving a metal detector for his seventh birthday, Lucas Hall’s gift is already paying dividends for the first-grader.

While metal detecting with his father, Gary, on private property outside Berryville, Lucas had a feeling the two needed to stop and look.

His hunch paid off.

Buried six inches deep was a sword thought to have been used during the Civil War.

“We stopped on the four-wheelers and Lucas said ‘right here,”

Gary recounted Monday.

“So we started digging, and not a minute later, there it was.”

“I was excited,”

Lucas said.

But the pair was still unsure of their finding until they started digging deeper.

“We originally thought it was an old fence post,”

Gary said.

“I started pulling it out of the ground, and when I saw the handle I went ‘Oh my gosh.”‘

Lucas’s passion for metal detecting skyrocketed, his mother, Tina, said, after their neighbor gave him a few Civil War-era bullets he found while metal detecting on his property.

Lucas also likes the Science Channel show “Meteorite Men” - a program about two men who look for meteorite pieces with metal detectors.

“(The neighbor) gave me a lot of bullets,” Lucas said. “I like digging for them.”

“Lucas really likes the pursuit,” his mother said.

The family is still unsure what kind of care is needed to preserve their discovery, which has been sitting on a towel in their living room since it was found.

“That’s the biggest thing right now, just touching it makes it disintegrate, and I want to preserve this for him,” Gary said. “We haven’t had it to an expert yet because we aren’t sure who to take it to.”

Gary Crawford, president of the Kernstown Battlefield Association, examined a picture of the sword.

He believes it is a light cavalry sabre model 1840 or 1860, but said it’s too difficult based on its condition to determine where the sabre was manufactured or which side used it.

The handle design, Crawford said, helps narrow down the time period of manufacturing.

“There is really no way of knowing (which side used it) because many of these sabres were manufactured in the North before the war and stocked in southern armories,” he said. “When the war started, the South just took those weapons and passed them out to their troops.”

Crawford said that about 18 inches of the blade may be missing.

“It may still be in the ground,” Crawford said, “or it may have been broken and thrown away - that wouldn’t have been uncommon.”

Regardless of any monetary worth the sabre might possess, the family isn’t interested in selling the relic, Gary said.

“This is really just fun for him, and I want to keep it that way,” he said. “Lucas doesn’t have a concept of the Civil War, he just knows what we tell him. But when he gets older, I want him to look back on this and appreciate it.”

Tina said the sabre, and other findings, will be incorporated into home-schooling lessons for Lucas and his 9-year-old sister, Samantha.

Lucas has also found several Civil War rifle-musket and minie ball bullets.

“Now we can teach a unit on the Civil War,” she said. “When they dig something up, we can try and learn about it.”

Now that this boy has inspired you to go out and start your own adventure, make sure to visit Kellyco to find the perfect detector for you and maybe you too will be able to share a story about your amazing finds.

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Hi!

- Shaun & the Gang

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I just read an article about one family that collected over $1,000 in coins…

Nothing impressive there. I know guys who turn in one year’s worth of clad and have well over $1,000.

But these people are NOT treasure hunters. They’re “change hunters” and they pick up spare change (read: clad) wherever it lies; forgotten, tossed aside, and uncared for. No metal detector required.

The only tool at their disposal is their eyes. Well, and apparently some hand sanitizer and a coin purse.

The Humphreys family has collected over $1,000 in the last three years, so it certainly takes them a lot longer to find money above-ground only. But I think what they’re doing is a great idea - respecting our U.S. currency and making money while they’re at it.

They look everywhere a metal detector can’t go: Sidewalks, gutters, intersections, vending machines, grocery store lines, and parking lots just to name a few.

In the end, I don’t think anyone does better than the other if we both come out ahead! And for all the clad they can’t spot, hiding in the grass and under the soil, I’ll be there to grab it!

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No treasure hunter is complete without a good story of pillaged booty and pirate ships… that’s why we’ve decided to properly celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day here at TreasureHunting.com. Our sponsor, Kellyco Metal Detectors is also celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day by offering a replica Spanish coin, the same one plundered by Pirates from the ships sailing around the Caribbean, with every purchase of a metal detector September 19 - 21, 2008.

We went straight to the source of “Talk like a Pirate Day” and found the guys who invented it! Turns out they own TalkLikeaPirate.com and have a handy “how to” guide for those of us who don’t already have Pirate lingo built into our life.

Here’s what the folks at TalkLikeaPirate.com have to say:

“Why do we need an International Talk Like a Pirate Day?

Make no mistake. We do. But it’s a little hard to articulate why, especially when you’ve made the mistake of referring to your wife as a scurvy bilge rat and tried to order her back into the galley.

Talking like a pirate is fun. It’s really that simple.

It gives your conversation a swagger, an elán, denied to landlocked lubbers. The best explanation came from a guy at a Cleveland radio station who interviewed us on the 2002 Talk Like a Pirate Day. He told us we were going to be buried by people asking for interviews because it was a “whimsical alternative” to all the serious things that were making the news so depressing.

In other words, silliness is the holiday’s best selling point.

Before we go any further, there’s something we need to be clear about. Pirates were and are bad people. Really reprehensible. Even the most casual exploration of the history of pirates (and believe us, casual is an accurate description of our research) leaves you hip deep in blood and barbarity. We recognize this, all right? We aren’t for one minute suggesting that real, honest-to-God pirates were in any way, shape or form worth emulating.

So what is it exactly that we’re celebrating here, if not pirates? What, you’re wondering, is the point?

We’re going to be painfully honest here, perhaps fatally so.

The point is, there is no point.

And that’s what’s fun about Talk Like a Pirate Day specifically, and talking like a pirate in general.

We’re talking about the mere image of swaggering pirateness. And while this is a guys’ guide, the comely wench will have fun talking like a pirate, too. It’s powerful, yet harmless. Perhaps, dare we suggest it, the ultimate aphrodisiac. Try it!

When Sept. 19 rolls around and suddenly tens of thousands of people are saying “arrr” and “Weigh anchor or I’ll give you a taste of the cap’n’s daughter,” it staggers us. They are talking like pirates — not because two yahoos from the Northwestern United States told them to, but simply because it’s fun.”

So enjoy this day folks - it only comes around once a year!

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Just saw this on Yahoo! News and wanted to share it with you folks. It certainly makes you wonder about some folks…

“An Ohio man who says he doesn’t trust paper money has delivered enough coins to cover half the price of a brand new pickup truck.

Employees at a dealership in the Cincinnati suburb of Springdale say 70-year-old James Jones plunked down 16 coffee cans full of coins Tuesday for a new Chevrolet Silverado.

Salesman David Crisswell says employees spent 90 minutes counting the collection of dimes, quarters, half-dollars and dollar coins, which covered half the $16,000 price of the pickup.

Jones and his wife, Betty, wrote a check for the other half of the cost.

Jones’ son says his dad has always preferred to pay with coins. Dennis Jones says he’s most amazed that his penny-pinching father decided to replace his 1981 pickup, which struck his father when its parking brake failed last year, putting him in a hospital.”

I guess the most surprising part is that it only took employees 90 minutes to count all of that!

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Answer: Truffles. No, not the chocolates. . .

Don’t ask me how, because I’m really not sure exactly, but one way or another I ended up looking at a very expensive type of mushroom on Wikipedia.org.

I know what you’re thinking - “How does this relate to treasure hunting?” Well, these mushrooms, known as “Truffles” are extremely valuable and highly sought-after. In fact they’re worth almost as much as gold. In my opinion, that qualifies as treasure!

These mushrooms, or Truffles, are considered “ectomycorrhizal” - which means they grow near the roots of oak, elm, chesnut, pine and willow trees. The most common places to find them are in the states of Oregon and Washington, or France, Italy, Croatia and Slovenia. Duplicating the growing conditions for truffles commercially is not feasible or cost-effective on a wide scale, hence their high price.

So how much is a Truffle worth? Well, in 2005 at an international charity auction in Italy a 2.5lb. Truffle sold for $112,000.00!

Now I know you can’t find a Truffle with a metal detector, but I figured that you all should probably know about them. The next time you’re dirt-fishing and you come across something strange buried around an oak tree,… remember this post. You may have stumbled onto a different kind of treasure entirely. And trust me, there’s a market for them.

Check out the Truffle Wikipedia Page, or the wiseGEEK Truffle page for more information. It’s worth wasting a little time.

Happy Hunting!
~ Liz ~

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If you consider yourself a metal detectorist of any caliber then you have an extensive collection of pull tabs. If you’re anything like me, you wonder where the heck they all came from. So I did some digging around online to see what I could find about them and got a pretty good history lesson.

In the early 1960’s the Pittsburgh Brewing Company introduced “Iron City Beer” in ‘self-opening cans.’ The concept was pretty novel – just pull up on a tab and you had an open can of beer in your hand! No accessories like a ‘church key’ or bottle opener neccessary - imagine that! These early pull tabs were known as “zip tops” and were disposable. But because of the rough edges of the aluminum, the cans often left people with cuts on their fingers, lips and even noses.

But the revolution had begun! By 1965 the design was changed to the ring style, which I’m sure every metal detectorists has seen his or her share of. The ring style was even easier then the zip top; just put your finger into the ring, yank forward and have your beverage with less potential for physical injury - even better!

Needless to say, the swift evolution of the zip top to the ring tab revolutionized canned beverages. By the mid-60’s over 75% of all cans produced in the U.S. had a pull-tab opening.

But for all their convenience, the pull tabs were an environmental and metal detectorist’s nightmare. For 10 years people opened cans, ripped off the pull-tabs and threw them to the side because they were encouraged to - there was nothing else to do with these removable metal pieces. Pets and wildlife died from ingesting them, as did a few people who dropped them into a can and accidentally choked on them. They wound up everywhere – from beaches and parks, to playgrounds and garbage disposals. People routinely cut themselves in a time when hand sanitizer wasn’t in every woman’s purse.

Ten years after the “ring” version of the pull tab was introduced, an answer to this environmental and safety nightmare finally came. The “stay tab” style was introduced in 1975 by the Falls City Brewing Company, and they were here to stay – literally. These ring-style-stay-tabs are what we can see on every can of coke and beer in the grocery store today. Unfortunately, they don’t stay quite as well as the designers would have liked. But at least this style doesn’t force people to throw the tab aside… they actually have to do a little work to get it off.

Thankfully, metal detectorists like you and me pick these up as we go… cleaning the beaches, parks and playground for the future, all in the name of a healthy hobby. Personally, I think we live in a disposable world now-a-days, and I wonder when we’ll figure out that convenience comes at the price of our environment. But that’s another conversation, meant for another day. In the meantime, keep picking those pull tab’s up, and thank Pittsburgh Brewing Company for the introduction of your most frequent find.

For more history of cans, specifically beer cans, see Brewery Collectibles Club of America. Also look at RustyCans.com for a great history of cans in general.

- Shaun

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WARNING: The novel being discussed in this post is slightly absurd, with odd scenarios and sarcastic humor. But it’s about a thrift shop owner and how the items in his store hold souls, so I thought it would be neat to share. End warning.

I picked this novel by Christopher Moore up a few weeks ago and didn’t think to post about it until today. It’s about a man named Charlie who owns a thrift shop. His wife passes away unexpectedly and he becomes involved in a new sideline business of retrieving the souls of the dead or dying to protect them from the forces of the underworld. In other words, he becomes “Death.”

You folks are thinking “So Liz,… why are you telling us about this? It sounds kinda creepy!”

Well, you’re right. That kind of plot does sound a little creepy. But the book is written with enough humility and sarcastic humor to make it a really fun read. And the concept of how souls move about Earth is pretty nifty.

The concept is that a soul goes along with a person until they die. It’s then attached to an object that person really cared for when they lived. The person is then re-born, and goes along life without a soul until they reach the point in their new life where they died in the last one. Then they pick their soul up and do it all over again.

Charlie - the thrift shop owner - is responsible for making sure that the ’soul-items’ get safely from one person to the next. This is an ideal job for him since he owns a thrift shop and sees people’s formally cherished and used possessions come and go. And thus, he is “Death.”

See,… it’s not that creepy.

Can you think of any one object that you’ve loved and would like to see in the after-life?

We’ve all found things we’re proud of… maybe it was more “meant to be” then we know.

Either way, this is a fun book and it makes you appreciate a thrift shop a whole lot more!

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You can imagine my surprise as I’m cruising the internet this weekend, looking for something good to share with you folks, when I stumble upon a story about a 200 pound gold coin. First of all, gold prices are outrageous so who has the wherewithal to make a 200 pound coin out of the stuff? Second, imagine the sound that would make in your headphones! And third, can you imagine digging that thing up? It would probably take an entire team!

Thankfully (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) no one will be digging this coin up any time soon. The Times of India is reporting that this is the largest gold coin in the world, and I certainly won’t argue with them! It weighs in at 200 pounds and is approximately 50cm in diameter. It has a maple leaf on one side and an image of Queen Elizabeth II on the other. The Canadian mint is reporting a limited number of these coins will be available on special order while this one is on display in Abu Dhabi.

So how much is it worth? Well the face value of it is about $1 million - Good luck trying to cash that in at the gas station. As for actually purchasing the coin, it will cost about $2.4 million because of the current market value of gold. So all in all, it’s not a bad investment.

Let’s just hope that some rich millionaire invests in 20 of them and drops one on the way home.

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. . .you need this one. Hopefully you folks will find this video as hilarious as I did. It’s amazing the things that turn up when you search for “metal detectors” on YouTube.com! Enjoy!

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