Weekend hunt = Relic! Please help identify what kind of jar lid and year!? :)

[Detectingfreak]

Alright, so here is my story. I had a graduation party this weekend and one thing that I really wanted to do was detect an old 1922 school. I have been really excited about going back to this place with my new Minelab Explorer SE that I had bought back in May. Still learning the machine, I was having fun digging all sorts of items even with Iron masking on. The first place I hunted was a 1960 club building which had given up a wheat penny previously when I was using my Tracker IV metal detector. This time I had only gotten 3 more pennies out of the place. There was so much trash and junk around, it was hard to pick out the really nice signals.

I also hunted in front of my grandma's beach property! Getting a Dime and 4 pennies out of it. The Dime is 1967. Everytime I go over to her beach house I always get close to silver! Maybe one day the silver gods will shine down on me and give me some silver.

After that I decided to go to a school in Seabeck which has been closed for 1 year. I did not stay very long because I had only gotten 1 Dime out of it and could not pick up any other signals around.

After getting frusterated; I got into my car and zoomed off to the 1922 school near my grandma's beach house. This 1922 school has not given up much considering all of the logger kids who went here were poor and could not afford to loose money for me to find it. I was hunting around the back of the left side of the school where no one has recently touched it or moved any structure. I get this signal about 3-5 inches down and recover this old jar lid that looks to be from the 1920's. There used to be an old road leading to the school which is now long gone. I wonder if I little kid was eating beans or peaches and dropped the jar on the ground for me to find 86 years later.

If anyone has any information please let me know what year this lid is and what kind of jar it fit on? Also Chemical can I use to clean it? There looks to be writing on the back of it. Very faint but I can make out a B.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

A History of Mining on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska - Grab it through Amazon!

[mlw67]

Hi!

Your jar lid is probably from a fruit jar with some sort of clamp-style lid.

If you do a search on eBay for "kerr economy jar" you will see some similar type jar closures.

 

[alkoz]

That lid is called a wax-sealer, the lip of the jar would have the same indents as the lid, they would place a strip of wax inside the ridge them place it on the jar and hardened. They date from the 1850's to the1880's. If you type in wax sealer in ebay and click on bottles and insulators you'll find some of these jars as to what they looked like.

 

[Detectingfreak]

Thank you mlw67 and alkoz for helping me identify my first ever relic! I found out that it was a Fruit jar lid used to hold fruit. Also found out that it was somewhere between the 1880's- early 1900's. The school closed in 1922. That is my estimate; Never seen one of these Jar lids but now I have finally discovered one. I plan on putting it on display for my finds and putting a old 1900's picture of all the kids who went to the school and then put the find underneath it and name the period 1880's- early 1900's.