silversweeper
Sr. Member
- Aug 22, 2011
- 340
- 252
- Detector(s) used
- Minelab Etrac, CTX 3030
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
It seems like ages since I've had any finds worth posting about. 2013 has been a terrible year so far for my detecting anything great. One silver up until my last hunt and it was a beat up Rosie found in the park (the Barber dime in my pictures was actually my last silver of 2012). Some wheats, couple of V nickels, a buffalo nickel, one crusty indian, some assorted bullets that took several hunts to find digging deep iffy-iffy signals on a hunted out camp site, and some assorted odds and ends. Nothing worth crowing about. Until Monday. I'd been having problems gaining permission on anything new so decided to go hit a site I found late last year. The main site is planted in wheat so I went to do some scouting mainly. I ran into the property caretaker and chatted him up for info and he sent me off in a couple of different directions where I might find old house sites. The first looks very promising but is also in wheat. Picked up the tiny pieces of broken china there and a couple of Colonial era buttons around a big old tree where the farmer had pushed the foundation stones, then I hit one of those signals that you just know is going to be a coin. When I popped the plug I saw another thin blackened disc and figured it was just another plain Colonial button (have a couple of handfuls of those now so they're not as exciting as they used to be to me). When the sunlight hit it, however, I saw a design and a date on one side......177 were the numbers I could make out almost immediately and I almost sat down right there in the mud! Later when I got near a creek I rinsed the rest of the dirt off and my discovery turned out to be my oldest coin found so far, a 1772 1 Reale. Not in the greatest condition and someone pierced it with a tiny hole but.....it's beautiful to me. The hole is very tiny and tastefully placed (not like most holed coins I've found which always seem to have the hole punched in with a nail and right where the date would be....lol). I realize that the coin isn't old by European standards but it is ancient for my part of the world. 2013 may have started out slow but when my 2nd silver for the year turns out to be 241 years old.....I'm not going to complain.
As a side note, 1772 was the year that our country's revolution started stirring up. On June 9 – The British vessel Gaspee was burned off of Rhode Island and the first Committee of Correspondence was formed. This coin may have been kept as a reminder of those events, a few hundred yards from where I found the coin there's a small cemetery where a former Revolutionary war soldier is buried. He and his family (and extended family) settled here right after the Louisianna purchase. In 1772 there weren't many white people West of the Mississippi and this land holds at least 3 house sites that were built by some of the very first Americans in the state of Missouri! Can't wait until the wheat is harvested!!!
As a side note, 1772 was the year that our country's revolution started stirring up. On June 9 – The British vessel Gaspee was burned off of Rhode Island and the first Committee of Correspondence was formed. This coin may have been kept as a reminder of those events, a few hundred yards from where I found the coin there's a small cemetery where a former Revolutionary war soldier is buried. He and his family (and extended family) settled here right after the Louisianna purchase. In 1772 there weren't many white people West of the Mississippi and this land holds at least 3 house sites that were built by some of the very first Americans in the state of Missouri! Can't wait until the wheat is harvested!!!
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