treasure stories

[TheSanDman333]

Anyone have any personal treasure stories or successful treasure hunts they would b willing to share?? I love hearing them kinda stories

 

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[deepskyal]

I'll tell you a true family treasure story...a trunk of silver dollars that's never been found. This was told to me by both my mother and her cousin.

Back when they were kids, their grandfather, (my great-grandfather) would give them a silver dollar on their birthdays. He would go into the bedroom, get it out of a locked footlocker and then give it to the child.
Story goes, my mom and her cousin were in that bedroom playing one day with the combination lock on the trunk and got it open. It was full of silver dollars. This was probably back in the late 30's, early 40's.
Anyhow, their grandfather walked in on them playing with the dollars. They had stacks of them and were using them like little building blocks when he saw them. He got extremely angry, paddled their butts good and hard to teach them a lesson and then put all the coins back in the trunk and carried it out of the house.
The next years birthday, he walked back behind the chicken coop and came back with a silver dollar. (so you can take a guess where the silver dollars were)
A few years pass, mom and her cousin grow up enough to not want to go to the farm anymore and soon the grandfather sells his farm and moves to a small house in another town.

This is where it gets interesting. My mom's cousin never forgot about those silver dollars and I remember him telling me about them when he went out and bought himself a metal detector, planning on going back to the old farm and detecting the chicken coop area. The new owner was some retired military dude, very miserable and bitter and told my mom's cousin no way was he letting anyone on his property. There went his plans to detect the farm.
But....wouldn't grandpap TAKE the dollars with him when he moved
My aunt had bought the house from them shortly before they passed. Her husband also had known about the story and he proceeded to dig up the entire basement of that house. As far as anyone knows, he didn't find squat.
My mom's cousin told me a few years later that grandpap said, "People will walk all over my money but noone will ever find it." He thought the other possibility of where the money went was in the floorboards of that house but he wasn't about to say that to my uncle. He was a black sheep in the family which I won't explain.

As far as I know and from the stories I've heard from several family members, as I did talk to my uncle also and got his confirmation, it was never found...and there were probably a few hundred coins in that trunk.....all silver dollars, probably predating the 30's... (you'd have to wonder what condition these coins would be, not being circulated much from when they were stashed.)

Did he leave them on the farm, figuring on going back to retrieve them one day but being struck by a stroke, lost all memory of most of his life...and the coins
Or did he take them with him to the last house he lived in and somewhere in the rubble the trunk is still there?

I stopped by where the house used to stand, it had recently been torn down which I had no knowledge about. My uncles sister's child had inherited the house but it was so poorly deteoriated she didn't bother with it, just had it torn down.

I talked to the neighbor, whom suprisingly had remembered me from when I was a kid visiting my aunt and uncle. He remember them tearing the house down and I asked if they found anything in the demo process. He said no. He watched as they simply bulldozed it in, not looking through the rubble, loading it on a truck and hauling it away.

I think had the trunk of silver dollars been in the house, a bulldozer would surely have torn the case apart and someone would have spotted some of them....I would think Or...did they just fall down into where the basement was and are now under 10' of dirt and debris

BUT...always a but, there was a rose garden at that house that was demo'ed. A stone wall, more for retaining the hillside right behind the house, was the base of it and my aunt had row upon row of roses going up the hill. I remember one year as a very young boy of maybe 7 or 8 years of age, weeding my aunts rose garden because there was poison ivy all through them and I was immune to it. (not anymore..lol)

Nobody thought about that retaining wall...but I have. That's why I was going back to that house, to see if anyone was living there and to get permission to search the yard. (Didn't know it had been torn down.) It was a rough stone wall, hand stacked, no concrete that I can remember, maybe 3 feet high.
So you can imagine my dismay when I got there and saw nothing but a pile of rocks and debris where the house and wall once were.
I remember the place being almost as bad as a shanty back when I was a kid, let alone 40 years later before my uncle died and I talked to him...I think the place was sinking...lol
And even now I just remembered a crawl space under the front porch...maybe...

So take your pick of locations where them dollars are.. and whether they are even accessable anymore. Not a treasure you read about in books because this is a family treasure tale...and a true one.

But with any treasure lore, and I guess I'm one to carry on family stories, you have to look at how many possibilities exist once those dollars left that bedroom and behind the chicken coop. I'm the older generation now, heading into my upper fifties...telling my kids, nephews and nieces of the things their grand-parents did..(my mom and dad as stories told to me by them)

Oh, and here is another possible clue where those coins went to...lol...my grandmother, daughter of the guy that hid the dollars, told me if I had a chance to get on the farm, there is a stone near a creek that has her dads name and the date carved in it by him and she would like the stone if I would get it. Now my grandmother was very old school, never missed a day of church...your typical grandmother from the 50's and 60's, sitting around knitting in her spare time. And here she gives me a marker of some sort to look for. Hmmmm.
Maybe her dad was bored one day and just decided to hang out along the creek and carve his name on some rock for something to do with no reason for it....or maybe he didn't want to forget something so he placed a marker there?

If only we knew where those dollars went after he had them burried behind the chicken coop and if they even left at all

And just a final note here. I think this was my introduction to what metal detecting was, my uncle telling me why he had bought his. It was some years later when I bought my first, back in the early 80's, but that family treasure tale still has my mouth watering...lol

Al

 

[leprechaun]

Great story,hope you find the silver dollars.