Uknown, 1 brass, 1 silver/lead

[JRMan]

In Framingham MA. for a couple of weeks of work. Detecting some open forest land when I have time after work. Found these 2 items and not sure what they are or how old they might be.

First is a brass item maybe a cloth bag strap holder?:


The second one is a what looks like a very small flask/container of some kind. It looks to have a silver cap and what seems to be lead or a very soft metal container or what is left of it.

 

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[taz42o]

I think that would be a colonial shoe buckle.?

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

Definitely a Colonial-era shoebuckle. Nice fancy all-brass one -- and, it is fully intact and undamaged. Hard to come by in that condition. It's going to have more than small dollar-value. I do not deal in Colonial-era relics, so I cannot give you a highly accurate evaluation, but I'm sure it is at least $100, and perhaps somewhat more. Pardon me if you already know this: do not "overclean" it (and especially, don't shine it up).

The second object is esentially a "toothpaste-tube/linement-tube" -- but that's just a generic description. Somebody here who knows more than I do about late-1800s/20th-Century non-military household objects will be along soon to give you a more-specific ID of it. The raised star on the cap is an important ID-clue.

The third object is a fired bullet in wood. We used to find lots of similar ones at civil war battlefields. Being impact-damaged, the bullet is often hard to identify. That being said, it does not look like a 20th-Century bullet. Can you give us an accurate estimate of its size? Being found in Massachusetts in be a Colonial or first-half-of-the-1800s musketball -- but that will depend on its size. (Even its "smushed" size will tell us something useful.)

 

[bigfoot1]

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[wvwildman]

nice finds congrats HH

 

[JRMan]

Wow! Great information.. I really appreciate it. I also appreciate the tip not to try to clean the brass the photo was as I found it with a bit rinsing under the facet. I am new to this great hobby and can use all the helpful tips I can get. Got a detector in the 1980s but frankly did not use it much. Now I am a fanatic and am out all I can. Toothpaste tube makes sense now that I think about it. I could not think of why a tube would be made of thin lead.

Here is a new photo of the bullet, Found it just under the leaves not in the ground:

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

Thank you for the VERY good photo showing the size measurement of fired-bullet-in-wood.

It shows that the bullet is too small to be an "impact-smushed" .69-caliber-or-larger musketball. It could be from a .50-caliber Flintlock musket or a .44 Percussion pistol (among other possibilities).

You said you found that chunk of wood with a fired bullet in it "under the leaves, not in the ground." The way that happens: As you know, a bullet doesn't kill a tree -- it can live for hundreds of years after it got hit by the bullet when it was young. We civil war relic diggers sometimes STILL find really-old, mostly rotted, dead treetrunks laying on the ground, with a fired civil war bullet in the nearly-rotted wood.