Old too soon, smart too late..... When I was growing up in NJ, I lived on 6 acres remaining from a 300 acre fruit farm. The house was built around late 1800s to early 1900s. Main house, tenant house, barn, fruit packing house and a dozen outbuildings for tractors, storage and working farm activities. Most of the outbuildings had dirt floors in at least a portion of them. Before I ever had a metal detector in my hand, I had found two secret hiding places on the property, clearly used to hide something of value. I found a 16" section of 4" diameter terracotta clay pipe 2' deep in the garden while I was digging a hole to bury a dead rabbit. There was a flat rock on either end of the pipe and there were no other pipes in the area, but the pipe was empty. I also found a hidden compartment in the wall in the barn. I used my pocket knife to slide a drawer out from between the studs. Both times I thought I had found a treasure but alas both hiding places were empty. The story was that there was $20,000 unaccounted for in the original owner's estate when he died, and it was never found. Who knows, with the depression and the US going off the gold standard, the owner might have turned his cash into gold and buried it on his property. The property was sold in 1989 when my mother passed away, and since then the fruit packing house has burned to the ground. I have always wanted to go back and hunt the property with a metal detector. I actually think it was common to bury valuables in the dirt floors inside outbuildings. A dirt floor would be a perfect place to do the digging without being noticed. You may have found just that kind of cache hiding place. Well done. Make sure you look for more where that came from.....