First flat buttons!

[brianc053]

Hi all! I'm normally a poster on the gold side of this forum; I've posted many trip reports in the past showing my son and I dredging.
But we recently got a Minelab Equinox 800 (to go with my White's MXT Pro) so we could detect together, and this spring I tried to get permission to hunt some old sights in our town.
A local farm that runs a co-op program where we get our summer produce and eggs said "sure, you can detect here!" so we finally got out there today.
The farm has been in this family for generations, and old maps from the mid-1800's show an old home site that is now one of their pastures. That's where we detected for about 2 hours today.

Not 10 minutes into the hunt we found a (recent) horseshoe. The farm owner's daughter even recognized which horse it came off of!
We also found some other random iron pieces that were interesting to the farm owner, shown in the first picture below.

My son and I are still learning the Equinox, so at first we were digging every signal, but it didn't take me long to start to separate out the "good" signals from the iron. (We've hunted in a local park a few times and have learned to find coins...but also bottle caps and foil. That's metal detecting!).
At the farm one piece of foil fooled us, but we did find the two flat buttons below - our very first flat buttons ever! (other than the park we've almost exclusively hunted on beaches before with the White's).
I'm sorry the picture of the first (somewhat green) button is out of focus. The farm owner asked to keep everything we found, which was fine with us - we just wanted to find the stuff! But I had to quickly take pictures before we left, and didn't realize that first one was out of focus.
The second one has some silver-ish patina or finish on it. I'm not sure if that's sterling or something else, but it's shiny (not white).

I don't know much about buttons. I've started to do some reading on here, but it's obvious there are thousands of different button styles/types of all sorts of ages.
Anything anyone can offer about these buttons would be appreciated. Rough age? Any chance they're from the 1800's? When did flat buttons stop being used on clothing?

Thanks for looking!
- Brian

Iron finds:


Green-ish button (front/back):


Silver-ish button (front/back):

 

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[toasted]

Those buttons look 18th century to me. If theyhave back marks they are no older than 1800. You stop finding flat buttons on sites that date after the civil war

 

[Professor of Engineering]

Congrats on the first flat button!

 

[Doug from NS]

Those buttons look 18th century to me. If theyhave back marks they are no older than 1800. You stop finding flat buttons on sites that date after the civil war

Great to know. I have found a lot of these flat buttons along the old roads up here, I had wondered how old they were.

 

[Inspector]

Nice hunt, cool buttons & congrats on your first, you will find many more

 

[Javadroid]

Nice relics and old buttons are always great finds - congrats mate!

 

[brianc053]

Thanks for all the kind words!

Quick update: My son and I returned to that farm today for about an hour, and found one more flat button. I tried to get better pictures this time. I was surprised by how thin this button is:


We also found our first coin at this location, though it was from 1948 (which is still a good find, but not really special...I know):

 

[brianc053]

Went back to the farm again this afternoon.
Found another flat button (this one had an interesting edge, and a corroded shank on the back).
Also found the handle of a knife or tool, and an old nozzle tip. Plus lots of nails.

All of this is coming from a 30 foot by 20 foot area....and they have 40 acres at the farm. I think I found my go-to location!