✅ SOLVED Age of lead salmon net weights?

[USNFLYR]

I search an area that has many lead weights discarded. I believe these to be seine net weights. They appear to be molded by hand. I think the process was to use a mold and afterward cut off the tips, much like snipping off a cigar tip. Most have thin lines indicating deliberate contact (knife strikes?) and most have uneven surfaces, as well as added circular dab of lead.

A few years ago, a TN forum responder said these are indeed net weights. He lives further downstream from me (closer to Astoria). That was a good thing to confirm It’s usage, etc.

Now I am trying to place a date (era) the salmon operations occurred on this particular beach head. I know that early in the 20th century the net weights used a different metal/lead and were mass produced and machine made. I can’t find much on the internet concerning hand made net weights, and the year(s) that fishermen quit using them.

Can anyone elaborate? They are cool! I tell all my friends that these finds keep me in practice for yearly trips to CW camps and dropped bullets. The signals are identical

 

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[USNFLYR]

Agree, homemade gillnet weights - I found a group of them at Reeder point on Sauvie Island under a tree. According to the family of the farm/campground a regular in the 50's/60's would string a gillnet in a area between 2 old pilings for salmon and store his cotton net hanging in a cedar tree. One year he didn't return, the cotton rotted away and I found the lead. I searched my detecting pics, don't have a photo. But many of them were strips of lead folded and then looked to be wrapped around the rope.

Wow, your finds are within 10 miles of my finds. That's great that it's confirmed ...
they are neat objects. I have a plate full of 'em

 

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[USNFLYR]

yep, I find these up in the Willapa all the time at old habitation sites. If you figure Shoalwater Bay was settled using 1850 as a start date and adding to that the bottles that also come out of these sites as between 1870 and 1900... you get a pretty good idea of the date. The Astoria and mouth of the Columbia area are FULL of old cannery sites, the old pilings are everywhere. Great idea to head to the tackle shop, there is a wealth of information in the local population.

Hey Unclemac, I think you were the one that confirmed these years ago. Thanks then and thanks now for weighing in. Since your initial response I kept finding more and more of them and got obsessed with dating them. I guess I needed to be able to speak with clarity when I was showing them off on my shelf! Those detectorists out east ( whom I envy) can be proud of bullets, but dog gone it, I'm proud of my homemade gill nets weights

 

[unclemac]

Consider too, at the cannery sites you run across old copper black smith soldering tips. But if you are finding these on stretches of beach, you could be at old Chinook habitation sites.