bookfisher
Bronze Member
Mini Cache From The Woods 38 Mercury & Roosevelt Silver Dimes!
Okay, so here's the story: This afternoon I'm in a new section of woods that I never hunted before, about a half mile away from where I found the 1807 Spanish One Reale on July 10th. As usual, I'm walking a trail with my mental metal detecting radar turned up high looking for a spot off the trail that has a nice old look and feel to it. My first time leaving the trail and entering the woods, turned out to be a no go, since I was hitting shallow overload junk that appeared to be a mid 20th century dumping ground. So I get back on the trail heading west. I sort of have a destination in mind, since I looked at this area on satellite before leaving the store. Anyway, about five minutes down the trail, I came to a fork (and I took it like Yogi Berra suggests), sorry I just had to get that Yogi reference in. After thinking for about a minute about which fork to take, I decided to take neither fork, and head up an incline that split the forks and which appeared to have some decent looking clear and level ground at the top. I like large cleared areas at tops of hills, since I figure people in the past might have lingered there. So I start hunting the area, and after a short time, I get a good penny/dime reading at a shallow depth of maybe 2 or 3 inches. Now at this point, I had no reason to get excited, since I'm looking for deeper 19th century and colonial coins and artifacts, and I figured this coin was probably going to be a clad dime. I cut a plug, pulled out some dirt, and was surprised to come up with a 1924 Mercury Dime. Now at this point I can't remember exactly what happened next, but I think when I was pinpointing the '24 Merc, I was noticing other penny/dime signals really close by. So after recovering the Merc, I scanned the hole and perimeter and came up when another penny/dime signal which turned out to be a Roosevelt Dime. I scanned the hole again, and found another Roosevelt dime. Scanned again, another silver dime. Repeat the process, another dime, and everytime I took a coin out of the hole and rescaned the hole, I got another signal, or multiple signals space about a foot apart. At this point I had six silver dimes, and I took a quick break to take a drink of water and to secure the dimes in my wallet (I don't carry a pouch). Getting back to the hole, I am continuing to get penny/dime signals in the hole and also on the perimeter of the hole. So since they were slightly scattered and not concentrated in a group, I keep widening the hole, by taking a few inches off the top of the edges, when those widening plugs proved to be devoid of signals, I would then go in the now wider hole, and continue to get more penny/dime signals. Now at this point I probably have about 15 dimes, and I starting to think that somebody probably dropped a roll of 50 dimes. After about a half an hour, I had extracted about 33 or 34 dimes from this one hole. Then I had to go work on another signal (that I had discovered during the first excavation) that was four size 8 sneaker lengths away (I measured the distance) From that second hole I pulled another 4 or 5 dimes. Sorry, for the long story, but it was a mighty long and enjoyable dig. Now the weird part, why and how were they dropped? After I stopped getting signals, I still spent another half hour digging the hole wider and deeper, looking for what I thought would be the missing 12 dimes to complete the roll. There was no remnants of a leather pouch or wallet in the hole, nor any remains of a jar or container. The dimes in the main hole seemed to range in depth from 2 or 3 inches to maybe 5 or six inches deep (though I was digging deep and piling dirt on the side of the hole and recovering the dimes from the piles, so I can't say exactly what the maximum depth was. Anyway, I've gone on really long so here's the dates of the 38 dimes:
1924 (2)
1926
1928
1929
1936
1938 (2)
1939
1940 (2)
1941 (4)
1942 (5)
1943
1944 (3)
1945 (2)
1946 (5)
1947 (5)
1948
1951
Okay, so here's the story: This afternoon I'm in a new section of woods that I never hunted before, about a half mile away from where I found the 1807 Spanish One Reale on July 10th. As usual, I'm walking a trail with my mental metal detecting radar turned up high looking for a spot off the trail that has a nice old look and feel to it. My first time leaving the trail and entering the woods, turned out to be a no go, since I was hitting shallow overload junk that appeared to be a mid 20th century dumping ground. So I get back on the trail heading west. I sort of have a destination in mind, since I looked at this area on satellite before leaving the store. Anyway, about five minutes down the trail, I came to a fork (and I took it like Yogi Berra suggests), sorry I just had to get that Yogi reference in. After thinking for about a minute about which fork to take, I decided to take neither fork, and head up an incline that split the forks and which appeared to have some decent looking clear and level ground at the top. I like large cleared areas at tops of hills, since I figure people in the past might have lingered there. So I start hunting the area, and after a short time, I get a good penny/dime reading at a shallow depth of maybe 2 or 3 inches. Now at this point, I had no reason to get excited, since I'm looking for deeper 19th century and colonial coins and artifacts, and I figured this coin was probably going to be a clad dime. I cut a plug, pulled out some dirt, and was surprised to come up with a 1924 Mercury Dime. Now at this point I can't remember exactly what happened next, but I think when I was pinpointing the '24 Merc, I was noticing other penny/dime signals really close by. So after recovering the Merc, I scanned the hole and perimeter and came up when another penny/dime signal which turned out to be a Roosevelt Dime. I scanned the hole again, and found another Roosevelt dime. Scanned again, another silver dime. Repeat the process, another dime, and everytime I took a coin out of the hole and rescaned the hole, I got another signal, or multiple signals space about a foot apart. At this point I had six silver dimes, and I took a quick break to take a drink of water and to secure the dimes in my wallet (I don't carry a pouch). Getting back to the hole, I am continuing to get penny/dime signals in the hole and also on the perimeter of the hole. So since they were slightly scattered and not concentrated in a group, I keep widening the hole, by taking a few inches off the top of the edges, when those widening plugs proved to be devoid of signals, I would then go in the now wider hole, and continue to get more penny/dime signals. Now at this point I probably have about 15 dimes, and I starting to think that somebody probably dropped a roll of 50 dimes. After about a half an hour, I had extracted about 33 or 34 dimes from this one hole. Then I had to go work on another signal (that I had discovered during the first excavation) that was four size 8 sneaker lengths away (I measured the distance) From that second hole I pulled another 4 or 5 dimes. Sorry, for the long story, but it was a mighty long and enjoyable dig. Now the weird part, why and how were they dropped? After I stopped getting signals, I still spent another half hour digging the hole wider and deeper, looking for what I thought would be the missing 12 dimes to complete the roll. There was no remnants of a leather pouch or wallet in the hole, nor any remains of a jar or container. The dimes in the main hole seemed to range in depth from 2 or 3 inches to maybe 5 or six inches deep (though I was digging deep and piling dirt on the side of the hole and recovering the dimes from the piles, so I can't say exactly what the maximum depth was. Anyway, I've gone on really long so here's the dates of the 38 dimes:
1924 (2)
1926
1928
1929
1936
1938 (2)
1939
1940 (2)
1941 (4)
1942 (5)
1943
1944 (3)
1945 (2)
1946 (5)
1947 (5)
1948
1951
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sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetttttttttttttttttttttttttttt 
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