Treasure Hunting

Several months ago we reported about the Civil War relic collector who died as a result of poorly handled artillery that is still active, but we’re still not entirely convinced that old shells and cannon balls should be destroyed when found.

Several weeks ago Dave Sink found a piece of history in the creek bank that his 2 year old daughter plays in. “I wasn’t sure what I had, she was stomping in the creek and next to her was what looked like an old tin can that had been in the water for awhile. When I picked it up, I realized it wasn’t a can. I carried it up to the library and everybody just kind of stared at me. They said ‘Why don’t you call 911?’ ”

So that’s what Sink did. And the Knox County SHeriff’s deputies took the shell and “finished the job a Union Army cannon started nearly 145 years ago. They blew it up.”

“It was full of black powder,” said KCSO Assistant Chief Deputy Robert Sexton, who oversees the Special Hazards Team. “We rendered it safe. We collected the pieces and will dispose of them safely. There is no more shell.”

Local relic-hunters say such shells still turn up from time to time. The Battle of Campbell Station near what’s now Farragut on Nov. 16, 1863, left shells scattered around the area when troops under Confederate Gen. James Longstreet tried and failed to cut off Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s retreat to Knoxville.

“There was probably more artillery fired in that battle than in any battle in East Tennessee,” said Dewey Beard, a local historian and longtime relic hunter.

The shell that Sink and his daughter found was classified as a 10lb Parrott shell. It was most likely fired by a Union artillery crew and is named after inventor Robert Parker Parrott. Shells like this relied on the heat from the cannon blast to ignite a fuse in its tip. Relic hunters argue that this fuse would have gone dead long, long ago.

“If it didn’t go off then, it probably won’t go off now,” said Gerald Augustus, a retired Loudon County educator. “Unless it’s near a very hot fire, the biggest danger would be if you dropped it on your toe.”

Of course, veteran collector Sam White who tragically died in February is recalled after a shell exploded in his Virginia home as he was trying to disarm it. But still, historians say that there is a very slim chance of danger with these relics.

The local Sheriff’s office assistant chief says he understands the historical value of such an item, but doesn’t want anyone to have the chance of getting hurt by something that was designed to explode.

Meanwhile, Sink is thinking of buying a metal detector for relic hunts of his own.

We wish him luck, and of course we encourage any artillery to be properly handled - be it in a glass case, far from heat, or destroyed to prevent future injury… we’re just not sure which tactic we favor more.

- Shaun

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Well folks, it’s just like the headline says, a Canadian man was arrested for metal detecting…

In a cemetery!

Around 8:00p.m. police received a call about a suspicious man in a cemetery. When they arrived, they found a man carrying a metal detector, a shovel, and several sentimental items covered in soil. There were fresh holes throughout the cemetery and one burial plaque had been dug around and damaged.

The 36 year old Canadian has been charged with mischief under $5,000, theft under $5,000 and possession of stolen property under $5,000.

Remember folks - Have fun out there, and respect the places you hunt. We don’t believe it’s ever a good idea to dig for gold in such a sacred place, and apparently neither does Canadian police officers.

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We’ve been getting a lot of emails here at TreasureHunting.com about Tropical Storm Fay. And we’re actually doing pretty alright. Buried deep in St. Cloud, Florida, we’ve had a lot of rain and wind but nothing disastrous.

Our friends on Florida’s beloved “Treasure Coast” are not doing so well. St. Lucie County officials have doubled their earlier estimates of flood damage from Fay while homes in Ft. Pierce are the hardest hit and flooded.

Fay’s has quickly been reported as the worst flooding Florida has ever seen. Linda Hargrove of Suntree, Florida says 13 inches of water had to be dumped out of her pool in a 24 hour period. Winds of 45 miles per hour were reported as early as this morning, while winds of 60 miles per hour were reported yesterday. And if that wasn’t enough - Cap Canaveral reported that 22.83 inches of rain had fallen in the last three days, while Melbourne reported 26.65 inches of rain fall.

Either way, this is no fun and we’re ready for it to stop raining. Thankfully, we’re high and dry and have power, but we feel bad for the rest of our fellow Floridians.

- Shaun & The Treasure Hunting Gang

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The 7th Century Pure Gold Cross that was found by a treasure hunter on a farm in Nottinghamshire now has a partner - a jewel-encrusted gold ring from the 14th or 15th Century was found too. That makes TWO rare and valuable treasures that have been unearthed in the East Midlands in just a few weeks!

Metal detectorist John Stevens was going over a farm in Leichestershire when he discovered a rare and very important ring.

Antiquities expert Brett Hammond says “It is quite unusual for a ring, after all this time, to still have the original stone in it. It is an important piece and would have been owned by someone quite wealthy in the church or even royalty.”

The ring holds its original stone - a valuable black colored jewel - and is inscribed around the outside. So far no one is telling us what it says.

Like the gold cross, this ring is unusual and very valuable. Both of the artifacts are considered “high quality” and will go through the process of being declared a treasure by the British Museum.

Read the BBC article and see pictures of these stunning finds.

Congratulations Mr. Stevens! You’re a hero to metal detectorists around the world!

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If you’ve never heard of the American Civil War “Battlefield Ring,” don’t feel bad. Neither had we. But now that we have we are completely obsessed.

According to the Winchester Star, metal detectorist Tony Lockley of Frederick County found a ring, referred to by some as “the find of the century,” and as a “national treasure” by others.

The story goes like this:

21 years ago, Tony and his friend John Tracy Campbell were metal detecting on private property when John got a strong signal. He handed his metal detector to his wife to pinpoint the signal and start digging. When they finally got to what was giving the sound, a large, gold-plated ring, size 11, popped out of the soil.

That’s an average enough find… but this ring was inscribed… with the names of 16 Civil War battles and skirmishes that starts with the engagements during the 1862 Peninsual campaign (York town and Williamsburg) and ends with the Siege of Petersburg in 1864-65. In between were landmark battles such as Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and The Wilderness.

John and Tony were definitely hooked on metal detecting but neither of them really understood the uniqueness of the ring they found. In fact, John even gambled the ring in a weekly poker game during the mid 1980’s!

Tony, however, purchased the ring back in 1987 and displays it at Civil War relic shows and artifact exhibitions.

The Winchester Star, however, hits the nail on the head with its closing two paragraphs:

“Nonetheless, his curiosity remains at a high level of “pique” regarding the band’s origin. From where the ring was found, ’tis safe to assume it belonged to a Union soldier — most likely an officer who could afford to have the band made — in Gen. Phil Sheridan’s occupational forces that ringed Winchester after Appomattox. The names of the battles inscribed — for example, Antietam rather than Sharpsburg — clearly indicate Union ownership, while the dates of the battles suggest a post-war crafting.

The nagging question, of course, is who the ring belonged to. As there is no hint of identification, that basic fact is most likely lost to antiquity. What might be ascertained, though, is the unit to which that particular soldier belonged. The clue critical to solving this mystery may lie in the minor engagements inscribed on the ring. Two such battles are Williamsburg and Hanover Court House, fought in May 1862 during the Peninsula Campaign. Presumably, if one can pinpoint the Union units engaged in those two clashes and then determine if any were involved in the other 14, the search can be narrowed. Sounds like a job for PBS’s “History Detectives.”

And as for Tony,… he keeps a metal detector in the back of his pick-up, just in case…

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Just saw this on Yahoo! News and wanted to share it with you folks. It certainly makes you wonder about some folks…

“An Ohio man who says he doesn’t trust paper money has delivered enough coins to cover half the price of a brand new pickup truck.

Employees at a dealership in the Cincinnati suburb of Springdale say 70-year-old James Jones plunked down 16 coffee cans full of coins Tuesday for a new Chevrolet Silverado.

Salesman David Crisswell says employees spent 90 minutes counting the collection of dimes, quarters, half-dollars and dollar coins, which covered half the $16,000 price of the pickup.

Jones and his wife, Betty, wrote a check for the other half of the cost.

Jones’ son says his dad has always preferred to pay with coins. Dennis Jones says he’s most amazed that his penny-pinching father decided to replace his 1981 pickup, which struck his father when its parking brake failed last year, putting him in a hospital.”

I guess the most surprising part is that it only took employees 90 minutes to count all of that!

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… Guess how they found it!

Kerri Walsh went up for a block at some point during her Sunday morning match against Japan and her wedding ring flew off of her hand. She didn’t even bat an eyelash, but kept playing and USA even won the match.

Broadcasters noticed what happened and thanks to the tapes, officials were able to go back over the area that they believed the ring had landed in. But even with video assistance, the ring was amongst 17,000 tons of sand that gets raked over before each match!

So what did they do? Well, they broke out the metal detectors!

The official in charge of metal detecting says “The problem is, we rake the court. We heard a few noises, a few were false alarms. When we found it, it was pretty much under the net.”

Is this the first time a (hobby) metal detector has made an appearance at the Olympics? Maybe metal detecting will eventually be an Olympic sport…? Probably not,… but we can dream!

Good luck to Kerri Walsh and the rest of the USA teams!

~ Liz ~

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This is literally the holy grail of finds (for me anyway).

Telegraph.co.uk is reporting that a treasure hunter, metal detecting his farm in Nottinghamshire, has found a 1,400 year old pure gold cross buried 12 inches under sod.

“The unnamed man focuses on raised ground because that is the most likely place to find treasure, as centuries ago the lower ground would all have been under water.

He said: “The farm had what I’ve come to call “quiet land”, swathes of ground where the detector scarcely makes a sound.

“The near-silence in the headphones might lull the uninitiated into losing concentration.

“It has the reverse effect on me as I know that very shortly the silence will be broken by a positive signal that tells me I’ve found what was almost certainly a lost object, rather than a tossed-away bit of junk.

“A signal just like that made me aware that I’d tracked down a very interesting site. A long period of silent, but enjoyable, detecting was suddenly interrupted by a positive signal.”

“Within moments I was holding a lovely Saxon penny. And not long afterwards I came upon a patch of ground that unexpectedly gave me three or four signals within the space of a few minutes. All turned out to be fragments of what must have been a beaten copper plate.”

“Then, thinking I’d located another piece of the plate, I listened to a very subtle and mellow signal.

“The rich ploughsoil was very loose and I was soon probing beyond twelve inches.

“Instinctively I put down the digger and scraped gently at the soil with my gloved hand.

“Then I made contact with a piece of metal that made me want to remove my glove. It seemed warm, almost alive, to my touch.

“My fingers closed on it and when I opened them I was gazing down, literally with my jaw dropped in astonishment, at the most wonderful find I’ve ever recovered.”

The cross is made of 18 carat gold, decorated with stunning details and intended to be worn as a pendant. It measures just over an inch long and is set with red gemstones. The red stones are among the world’s most ancient gems and were used by ancient Greeks who called them “granatum,” the same word they referred to pomegrante seeds with. The cross is almost certainly English made, with gold that was probably melted down from Merovingian French coins.

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The Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center in Townsend will be getting one awesome donation this week. Coming from Mike Williams, a resident of Venice, Florida, is his father Charlie William’s Whiskey Still. A special building has been built by the Heritage Center to house the Still and the information about its origin and operation. It has been reassembled as closely as possible to its original form for the exhibit, which opened this week.

Charlie Williams lived just outside of Townsend, rumor has it “it was just far enough off all beaten paths that they wouldn’t just stumble onto it by accident.” But there was a good reason to try - Charlie was known for making “some of the best hooch in the hills.”

Charlie learned the skill of making Whiskey when he was just a young boy but three things made his Whiskey stand out from all the others:

The Still was operated by Charlie for 20 years, and he closed it down as recently as the late 1980’s. The Still was capable of handling as much as 450 gallons of mash and could produce 88 to 95 gallons of whiskey per run, which was about every six days.

Mike Williams, 60, said he got his first taste of moonshine at age 4 and missed his senior class photo at Townsend High School in 1965 because he was helping his father pour concrete for the ceiling of the bunker-style structure that housed the still.

If you’re in the area of The Great Smoky Mountain Heritage Center, make sure to stop by and see this exhibit. It’s certainly treasure in its own right, and is a wonderful tribute to a generation we may never really know.

Read the rest of this lengthy and engaging article at KnoxNews.com’s website, and see more pictures of Charlie and his son Mike.

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An Israeli lifeguard, David Shalom, was taking his regular morning swim off of the Mediterranean coast when he stumbled upon a 2,500 year old relic.

It’s a marble talisman, used to ward off the evil eye, and was found while the young man was snorkeling just off the coast. He immediately turned over the relic to the Israeli archeology society.

Measuring 8 inches in diameter, flat on one side and convex on the other, the white marble disc has a perforated center and the remains of two circles can be seen around the center of it. The circles represent the pupil of an eye.

The coast of the beach the lifeguard was swimming off of was where the ancient port city Yavne-Yam once stood and dates back to the 5th or 4th century B.C. This relic confirms mythological tales about superstitious sailors.

Yaakov Sharvit, director of the Marine Unit of Israel Antiquities Authority, states: “We know from drawings on pottery vessels that this model was very common on the bows of ships and was used to protect them from the evil eye and envy, and was meant as a navigation aid and to act as a pair of eyes which looked ahead and warned of danger. But we thought the eyes were only on fighting ships, not merchant ships. Only four eyes like these have been discovered in the world.”

Sharvit later went on to praise the lifeguard for handing the rare relic over to authorities, rather than pocketing it as many others have been suspected of doing.

I wish we had a picture of this particular piece, there are so many different types of talisman’s for avoiding the “evil eye” that I’m not sure which one is an accurate representation, but I think it’s pretty amazing the art that developed out of the need for protection.

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